PHP

PHP is an acronym for "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor" and is an open source server-side scripting language. It was designed for web development, but can also be used for desktop applications.

Advantages

Has a large community and many scripts and libraries are available on the Internet
Runs on many platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X)
Compatible with most of the web servers (Apache, IIS, nginx)
It is open source, so bugs can be quickly found and fixed
Has support for custom extensions, that can be written in C or C++ (in order to improve performance in critical areas)

Disadvantages

It is open source, so if there are any bugs, they can be used to exploit the weaknesses
Not enough support for desktop applications

Components

HTTP authentication
Supports Cookies
Supports Sessions
Handles file uploads
Connection handling
Persistent Database Connections

Development tools

Eclipse
NetBeans
Zend Studio

Versions