Chapter 5. Server-Side Programming in PHP

Ajax applications can work with virtually any server-side language, requiring only that the server should return correctly formatted responses to its HTTP requests. This lesson introduces PHP, a popular open source scripting language used on a huge number of web servers throughout the world.

Introducing PHP

Like JavaScript, PHP is composed of commands that can be embedded within the HTML code of your pages. PHP however is a server-side programming language—that is, it works hand-in-hand with your web server to process the source code of a page before that page is sent to the browser.

Why Do I Need To Know This?

As you are already aware, Ajax applications make calls to the web server and subsequently use the ...

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