PHP: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding the Programming Language and Its Security

Many developers use PHP programming language, an open-source server-side programming language, to create websites. Additionally, it is a general-purpose language that you may employ for a variety of tasks, such as creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). I’ll guide you through PHP’s universe in this essay so you can understand how it operates and its fundamental features. You’ll be able to create your first PHP Hello World application before the end.

What Does PHP Mean?

Personal Home Page (PHP) was the first meaning of the acronym. Hypertext Preprocessor is now an acronym that repeats itself. (It is recursive in that the initial word is itself an abbreviation; so, the abbreviation does not carry over the complete meaning.) 26 years have passed since the debut of PHP programming language. Version 7 is still the most popular one even if version 8 was published in November 2020. The most widely used implementation of PHP is the Zend engine. Additional implementations include those made by Facebook such as Parrot, HPVM (Hip Hop Virtual Machine), and Hip Hop. The primary purpose of PHP Programming languages is to build web servers. Both the command line and the browser may be used to run it. Therefore, you may view the output of your code in the terminal if you don’t feel like reading it in the browser.

Advantages of PHP

Because of a few benefits, PHP is very well-liked and has been the preferred language for web servers for more than 15 years. Here are a few advantages of PHP:

• Cross-platform: PHP programming language works across all operating systems. It may be used with any operating system, whether Mac, Windows, or Linux, so you don’t require a particular one to do so.

Open Source: PHP is an open source programming language. Anyone who wishes to develop it has access to the original code. Laravel, one of their frameworks, is extremely well-liked in part because of this.

• Simple to learn: Even complete beginners can learn PHP. If you already know how to programme, you can take up a lot of knowledge quickly.
• PHP synchronises with all databases – PHP programming language is simple to connect to both relational and non-relational databases. So you may rapidly access any database, including MySQL, Postgress, MongoDB, etc.
• Helpful Community: The online community for PHP is highly helpful. The official manual contains instructions on how to utilise the features, so if you get stuck, you can quickly solve the issue.

Who Uses PHP

PHP programming language powers the servers of many well-known businesses and IT behemoths, enabling them to do a wide range of incredible tasks.

• Facebook: Facebook’s website is powered by PHP. In exchange, the business gave back to the community by developing an implementation for PHP called Hip Hop.
• Wikipedia: Based on PHP, Wikipedia is one of the greatest online databases of knowledge on any subject.
• Content Management Systems (CMS): WordPress, the most widely used CMS in the world, is built on PHP. PHP is also connected with other content management systems, like Drupal, Joomla, and Magento. PHP is also used by Shopify.
• Web hosting services – A lot of web hosting services, like BlueHost, Siteground, and Whogohost, run their hosting servers on PHP.

Is PHP Dying?

Whether PHP programming language is declining or not is a hot topic in today’s society. This is due to the introduction and rising use of alternative languages like JavaScript (Node JS), Python, Golang, and others that are appropriate for the server-side.

This has really resulted in several amusing memes criticising PHP.

But is PHP programming language truly becoming extinct? No, is the response. PHP still powers the servers of over 80% of all websites, despite criticism and claims to the contrary from some individuals. Therefore, it is likely that 8 out of the 10 websites you visit each day will utilise PHP.

On the Indeed employment portal, PHP programming language outperforms several other programming languages in terms of job availability. Each year, many PHP developers earn well by developing WordPress themes and plugins; the typical PHP developer in the US earns $86,000 year.

How to Write Your First Hello World Program in PHP

It’s time to create your first Hello World application in PHP programming language now that you are familiar with the language and its benefits.

You must first have PHP programming language installed on your local computer. Installing a XAMP (Cross-Platform, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) or WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) server will enable you to accomplish that.

WAMP only runs on Windows, but XAMP runs on all operating systems. I’ll be working with WAMP.

Verify that all services are up and functioning before starting the WAMP or XAMP server. If you are running WAMP, the taskbar on your computer should display the green WAMP emblem.

Locate the WAMP server installation directory by opening up your C drive. It is wamp64 in my instance.

Open the installation directory, and then the www folder.

Create a folder right there and name it whatever you want, then open up the folder with your code editor.

Create an index.php file and paste in the following code:

<?php

 

echo “Hello World”;

 

?>

You can also put your “Hello World” text in a variable, then use the echo system to display it in the browser.

In PHP programming language, you can declare a variable with the dollar sign ($). Your statements, apart from the last one, must also be terminated by a semi-colon.

<?php

 

$greeting = “Hello World”;

echo $greeting

 

?>

To run your code in the browser, open up the browser and write this in the address bar localhost/the-folder-of-your-php-file/php-file.php, then hit enter.

Make sure your WAMP or XAMP server is running, otherwise it won’t work.

You can see that the code successfully ran in the browser, because I got the file path right.

Another beautiful thing about PHP programming language is that you can embed it in HTML. You can do it like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html lang=”en”>

<head>

    <meta charset=”UTF-8″>

    <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=edge”>

    <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″>

    <title>PHP Code</title>

</head>

<body>

 < h1 > This is the result of a PHP Code embedded in HTML< /h1 >

 

        <?php 

            $greeting = “Hello World”;

            $campers = “Hello Campers”;

 

            echo $greeting;

            echo “<br>”;

            echo $campers

        ?>

</body>

</html>

Conclusion

PHP programming language is still a useful and popular language for web development. Despite the ridicule and disagreement over whether it is still viable, PHP developers continue to make solid livings using the language. Therefore, it appears that PHP is here to stay.

About the Author

Ahsan Azam is the author who specializes in avionics as well as research writing. The author has a keen attention to detail and is focused on providing interesting content to the readers.

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