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
- 1.0
- 2.0
- 3.0
- 4.0
- 4.1
- 4.2
- 4.3
- 4.4
- 5.0
- 5.1
- 5.2
- 5.3
- 5.4
- 5.5
- 5.6
- 7.0