Rewind to about a decade ago: The World Wide Web was in its infancy. The Web was a completely static world created to share information, but it was a one-way street: readers had no real way to interact with a site. If content needed to be updated, it required the direct interaction of the content creator. The concept of a dynamic website was practically unheard of. The computer revolution we live in today was not clearly part of day-to-day life.
Today, the world seems to teem with information accessible at our fingertips. When you say "the Internet," you aren't looked upon as some sort of arcane wizard speaking gibberish. The Internet is a major economic force - a dynamic and lively place full of multimedia content and more acronyms than one can ever hope to comprehend. Programmers now have a plethora of programming languages at their command. The choices of languages are rich, and the languages vary in power, ease of use, and the level of abstraction from the hardware they run upon.
Welcome to PHP, an HTML-embedded scripting language, PHP is an easy-to-use yet very powerful language. PHP blends some of the best features of modern programming languages to create an unique and refreshing approach to writing web applications. Is PHP the right tool for your problem? If you are developing a web application, then yes. Although a variety of languages is available, PHP is designed from the ground up with web development in mind. All of these factors combine to make PHP very tidy and readily accessible, a language that allows applications to be developed with a minimum of fuss. While good design and proper management are always essential to developing quality software, the right tools are also equally important; when it comes to web development, PHP comes out on top.
Dynamic, data-driven applications and websites have become a very important way to allow a broad range of commerce and communication. PHP is free and runs on almost all popular hardware platforms. Combine PHP with an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) from the rich variety available, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Interbase, and you have a powerful, completely free development platform. To make things even better, the "internals" of all these applications - that is, their source code - are also available. And PHP can scale from personal projects to extremely high-volume applications.
