PHP

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to server-side web development where PHP generally runs on a web server. Any PHP code in a requested file is executed by the PHP runtime, usually to create dynamic web page content or dynamic images used on Web sites or elsewhere. It can also be used for command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications. PHP can be deployed on most Web servers, many operating systems and platforms, and can be used with many relational database management systems (RDBMS). It is available free of charge, and the PHP Group provides the complete source code for users to build, customize and extend for their own use.

PHP acts primarily as a filter, taking input from a file or stream containing text and/or PHP instructions and outputting another stream of data; most commonly the output will be HTML. The PHP parser compiles input to produce bytecode for processing by the Zend Engine, giving improved performance over its interpreter predecessor.

Originally designed to create dynamic Web pages, PHP now focuses mainly on server-side scripting, and it is similar to other server-side scripting languages that provide dynamic content from a Web server to a client, such as Microsoft's ASP.NET, Sun Microsystems' JavaServer Pages, and mod_perl. PHP has also attracted the development of many frameworks that provide building blocks and a design structure to promote rapid application development (RAD). Some of these include CakePHP, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Yii Framework, and Zend Framework, offering features similar to other web application frameworks.

The LAMP architecture has become popular in the Web industry as a way of deploying Web applications. PHP is commonly used as the P in this bundle alongside Linux, Apache and MySQL, although the P may also refer to Python or Perl or some combination of the three. Similar packages are also available for Windows and Mac OS X, then called WAMP and MAMP, with the first letter standing for the respective operating system.

Web content management systems written in PHP include MediaWiki, Joomla, eZ Publish, SilverStripe, WordPress, Drupal and Moodle. All Web sites created using these tools are written in PHP, including the user-facing portion of Wikipedia, Facebook, and Digg.

Vulnerabilities are caused mostly by not following best practice programming rules: technical security flaws of the language itself or of its core libraries are not frequent. Recognizing that programmers make mistakes, some languages include taint checking to detect automatically the lack of input validation which induces many issues. Such a feature is being developed for PHP, but its inclusion in a release has been rejected several times in the past.

There are advanced protection patches such as Suhosin and Hardening-Patch, especially designed for Web hosting environments.

PHPIDS adds security to any PHP application to defend against intrusions. PHPIDS detects Cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, header injection, Directory traversal, Remote File Execution, Local File Inclusion, and Denial of Service (DoS).

PHP source code is compiled on-the-fly to an internal format that can be executed by the PHP engine. In order to speed up execution time and not have to compile the PHP source code every time the Web page is accessed, PHP scripts can also be deployed in executable format using a PHP compiler.

Code optimizers aim to enhance the performance of the compiled code by reducing its size, merging redundant instructions and making other changes that can reduce the execution time. With PHP, there are often opportunities for code optimization. An example of a code optimizer is the eAccelerator PHP extension.

Another approach for reducing compilation overhead for PHP servers is using an opcode cache. Opcode caches work by caching the compiled form of a PHP script (opcodes) in shared memory to avoid the overhead of parsing and compiling the code every time the script runs. An opcode cache, APC, is planned to be built into an upcoming release of PHP.

Opcode caching and code optimization can be combined for best efficiency, as the modifications do not depend on each other (they happen in distinct stages of the compilation).

The PHP language was originally implemented as an interpreter. Several compilers have been developed which decouple the PHP language from the interpreter. Advantages of compilation include better execution speed, static analysis, and improved interoperability with code written in other languages. PHP compilers of note include Phalanger, which compiles PHP into CIL byte-code, and HipHop, developed at Facebook and now available as open source, which transforms the PHP Script into C++, then compiles it, reducing server load up to 50%.

PHP includes free and open source libraries with the core build. PHP is a fundamentally Internet-aware system with modules built in for accessing FTP servers, many database servers, embedded SQL libraries such as embedded PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite, LDAP servers, and others. Many functions familiar to C programmers such as those in the stdio family are available in the standard PHP build.

PHP allows developers to write extensions in C to add functionality to the PHP language. These can then be compiled into PHP or loaded dynamically at runtime. Extensions have been written to add support for the Windows API, process management on Unix-like operating systems, multibyte strings (Unicode), cURL, and several popular compression formats. Some more unusual features include integration with Internet Relay Chat, dynamic generation of images and Adobe Flash content, and even speech synthesis. The PHP Extension Community Library (PECL) project is a repository for extensions to the PHP language.

Zend provides a certification exam for programmers to become certified PHP developers.