PHP - Hypertext Preprocessor

The base PHP is a light and fast code language, and it can run on many platforms. Thanks to techniques such as caching, even the biggest websites are running PHP. The flexibility of PHP allows individuals to work with many different database systems such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. 

PHP has real advantages for developers and users: It is open source, easy to learn for beginners, and it is known as a stable and secure code language.

Standard file extensions for PHP are: .php, .php3 or .phtml, but a web server can be set up to use any extension. Its structure was influenced by many languages like C, Perl, Java, C++, and even Python.

This programming language first appeared in 1994 from Rasmus Lerdorf's need to find out how many people saw his résumé. Naming the scripts PHP, personal home page and spending the next three years into expanding this. Today, thanks to the open-source side of the coding, PHP benefits from great support from the online community, this being one of the reasons the number of sites written in this language grew so much. An essential difference compared to other programming languages is that PHP is a server-side interpreter - meaning the operations are implemented by a server and not from the user's computer. To test PHP pages you need a web server (Apache) and PHP package installed.