PHP takes Web by storm

I don’t assume that all InfoWorldreaders are familiar with PHP, especially in its modern form, now nearing its fifth version. Any fruitful discussion of PHP tools requires a fundamental understanding of the language itself.

Leon Atkinson ’sdefinitive book, Core PHP Programming, chronicles the history of PHP, the latest edition of which was published in 2003 by Prentice-Hall. PHP was originally a humble project by programmer Rasmus Lerdorfunder the name Personal Home Page. The open source community quickly took to Lerdorf’s clever blend of C, Java, and Perl, driving him to advance the language. That spurred countless others to write powerful PHP extensions that are now part of a massive repository of contributed code.

PHP is best known for its exceptional text handling — which now includes XML and XSLT — and its flexible connectivity to multiple database managers but it has grown well beyond that.

My copy of Atkinson’s book is a hefty 768 pages, and most of it documents PHP’s standard library. I can say with confidence that PHP is capable of handling all Web applications projects. What little you might need that hasn’t already been covered by a contributor is a snap to write yourself.

PHP’s latest stable release is 4.3.4, downloadable from the PHP headquarters site at www.php.net. A hopefully final beta version of PHP 5 is on deck. The PHP project team distributes PHP in two forms: Unix source code and precompiled Windows binaries, the latter being a concession to Windows’ lack of bundled development tools. Binaries for other platforms have been created by contributors whose sites are linked from the php.net downloads page. For example, I grabbed the OS X binary for PHP from www.entropy.ch/home/to use for my tests.

Developers with skills in Microsoft ASPs, Sun’s JSPs, or Macromedia’s ColdFusion will have no trouble transferring their skills to PHP. For Web developers, the best place to start is the PHP headquarters site.