PHP is a server scripting language, and is a powerful tool for making dynamic and interactive Web pages.
PHP offers plenty of possibilities:
- PHP is appropriate whenever you want your pages to be created dynamically when the browser requests the page. For example, you can display date, time, and other information in different ways. PHP will make your website more dynamic in content and a heck of a lot easier to update.
- PHP makes it easy to customize a Web page to make it more useful for individual users.
- With PHP you can set cookies, manage authentication, and redirect users.
- One of PHP most powerful features is database access. With PHP it is possible to access over 19 different types of databases and manipulate data within those databases based on input from the user via a web page.
- PHP makes it easy to send e-mail, work with newsgroups, and actually open a connection to another web site -- and get or send data with it. If you are already familiar with ASP development, PHP can also communicate with other server-side languages such as Java and use COM interfaces.
- PHP provides the means to do everything from generating PDF documents to parsing XML.