PHP

Executive Editor, Data & Analytics, Computerworld |

Greenland native Rasmus Lerdorf was tired of writing the same code over and over while creating his personal dwelling house page back in 1995.

So, he says, he wrote "a very simple parser" to supercede tags in an HTML file with some code he'd written in C.

That project evolved into PHP, an open up-source scripting language at present installed at more than one in every v Spider web domains, according to an Oct 2001 survey of more than than six million domains conducted by Netcraft, a Bathroom, England-based Internet consulting visitor.

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PHP fans say the language is exceptionally piece of cake to learn. It has a lot of congenital-in functions such as simple connections to databases and support for the Lightweight Directory Admission Protocol (LDAP).

"PHP was developed from the ground up to exist a Spider web platform," says Zeev Suraski, chief technical officeholder at Zend Technologies Ltd. in State of israel and an author of the current version of PHP. "Very powerful applications can be created in a very brusque time. . . This is the No. 1 feedback I get from people."

PHP code is highly portable; information technology moves from ane brand of server to another with minimal or no rewrites. This multiplatform back up appeals to IT managers who don't desire to be locked into a unmarried brand.

Gratis and Like shooting fish in a barrel

As open-source software, PHP is free for corporate use and works well with other popular open-source projects, including the Apache Web server and the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

"If we didn't have PHP, it would price us six to seven times as much to operate [our] IT surround," says Kevin Crothers, head of corporate Web systems at WorldCom Inc. WorldCom has used PHP for several major Spider web projects, both internal and external, including the front end to a searchable database of employees and contractors that contains more than than 100,000 records. "It'south all LDAP-based," he says, noting that PHP had "the strongest LDAP integration we've been able to discover."

PHP uses server resources efficiently, Crothers says. Information technology uses memory sparingly and allows client-side estimation of code to shoulder some processing burden.

"There's money in your pocket right there," he says, because a PHP-based application requires less server hardware than another environments. Crothers adds that he has found PHP to exist both stable and secure, and he believes that the language is very easy to learn compared with competing technologies such equally Microsoft Corp.'s Active Server Pages (ASP) engineering science for dynamic Web applications.

Room for Improvement

However, many developers generate ASP code from software such every bit Microsoft's Visual InterDev, which can be easier for nonprogrammers than coding in PHP, Suraski notes.

At present, there are no loftier-level commercial WYSIWYG Spider web authoring tools that automatically generate PHP pages, which ways you lot need actual programming noesis. That doesn't entreatment to every Web evolution shop, but Suraski says he believes some PHP authoring tools will be out later this year.

He also acknowledges that PHP's object-oriented programming adequacy, compared with that of Java, for instance, "is not equally powerful as information technology should be." This can brand PHP a bit more cumbersome for creating very large-scale applications. However, improvements are in the works for PHP Version 5.0, he said, which is due onetime in the second quarter.

Lerdorf says other upcoming improvements include making PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) more than useful. PEAR solves some Web-related problems but isn't part of PHP itself. "You will also see some squeamish ways to build [Simple Object Access Protocol/Web Services Description Language] services with PHP," he says.

PHP is an interpreted language and doesn't use compiled binary executables, so PHP applications tin exist more hands viewed and dissected by competitors, says Crothers. For hiding code or creating applications for resale, products such equally Zend's Encoder will mask some work.

For professional person-level quality assurance and testing, Crothers advocates using a product such equally Komodo from Vancouver, British Columbia-based ActiveState Corp. Komodo's integrated development surround is available free to individuals and nonprofit organizations.

Ultimately, Crothers says, PHP is an first-class environment for creating Web applications for WorldCom. "It does everything," he says.

Above is an example of uncomplicated PHP lawmaking for e-mailing data entered into an HTML course, where the form has fields chosen comments (for comments entered by a user) and frommail (for a user-entered e-mail address), as well as a hidden field tomail (for the address where data should exist sent). The email would be sent with the subject line "User Comments."

In a production environment, additional lawmaking would be added for validation and security.

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Sharon Machlis is Executive Editor, Data & Analytics at IDG, where she works on data analysis and in-house editor tools in improver to writing and editing. Her volume Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism was published in December 2018.

Copyright © 2002 IDG Communications, Inc.