Ubuntu® Linux® Secrets

Chapter 30. PHP

Secrets in This Chapter

• What Is PHP?

• The Ubuntu PHP Environment

• The PHP Language

• Object-Oriented PHP

With the popularity of the Internet, dynamic web programming has taken the world by storm, and the PHP programming language is at the forefront. PHP provides a relatively easy scripting language that you can add to your web pages to retrieve data from databases and display in your web pages. This chapter walks through the basic features of PHP and demonstrates how to use them in your dynamic web applications. The chapter concludes by discussing the object-oriented features of PHP and how to incorporate them to provide more advanced features in your web programs.

What Is PHP?

Chapter 21, "Web Server" described the popular Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) web application environment in Ubuntu and showed how to use it to serve dynamic web pages to clients. The core of this technology is the PHP programming language.

PHP started out as a personal project by Rasmus Lerdorf in the mid 1990s, but it quickly rose to the top of the dynamic web programming world because it was specifically designed for web programming. Unlike Perl, Python, and Ruby, which were originally designed as command-line scripting languages, PHP was designed to be run within web pages in a web application.

Note

The name PHP originally came from Personal Home Page because Rasmus intended for it to be used only on his own personal home page. Nonetheless, he released it into the open-source software world. Two developers ...