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PHP is confirmed by a recent Netcraft survey to be the most popular server side scripting language. As of July 2003, it is being used on over 13 million web sites. This is an amazing feat since Rasmus Lerdorf originally developed it in the late 1990s to track visitors to his homepage. Since then, it has rapidly evolved to a powerful server side language available on multiple platforms and supporting a range of applications. Its success can be contributed to the emergence of the Internet (or more specifically the World Wide Web), the simple nature of the language, and its support for the open-source web server Apache. Apache controls the large share of the web server market in the world. At that time, PHP was able to fill the void and address the dynamic function requirements of a web site in a period where there were very few alternatives.
Web Developers understand the need to create web pages that are more than just looks. It has to offer features that will enlighten a web user’s experience or make it more a more effective medium. Most of the higher end sites have features such as mail forms, search engines or shopping carts. PHP provide the tools to make this all happen.
PHP is not only just experiencing growth on the UNIX platforms but also on Windows. In a recent Netcraft survey, PHP was running on 7% on Windows where ASP has been very dominant. This has doubled over the last year and on the current growth rates, it will over take Cold Fusion as the most popular non-Microsoft scripting language on Windows over the year or so. Thus, it implies that web developers are less concerned about what language they adopt and are prepared to mix developments paradigms when it suits their pupose.
The language in the past that was used to add interactivity to a web site was CGIs written in PERL. PERL is an industry proven language but it was not very scalable. Each request from a CGI script would start a new process in the kernel, which uses both CPU time and memory, making CGI scripts not suitable for multiple concurrent uses. However, being so close to the kernel has its advantages with PERL especially running on top of UNIX based systems as it can interact with the operating system very closely – eg making operating system function requests. In other words, it was resource intensive for simple tasks. PHP solved the scalable issue by integrating itself with the web server or attached itself as a web server module.
PHP is released under the GPL agreement, which makes the source code freely available to the public. Being an open source project also allows users to download the application source and compile them on their computer for free. The access to source code has several advantages over commercial development models. For instance, development efforts are contributed worldwide, bugs can be dealt with quickly, and the ability to modify the source code for commercial advantages.
The PHP syntax is very similar to C or PERL, so for programmers with background with either of those languages PHP should be a low learning curve. It basically mixes features from both features, and adds functions to present easy-to-use tools for the needs of web programming. One distinct advantage of PHP is the ability to embed PHP code within a HTML file – similar to ASP (ASP is Active Scripting Pages that is similar to PHP but primarily for the windows platform). In PERL or C, you will have to write additional statements to generate the HTML output. Also, for dynamic web page generation and data retrieval, PHP has native support for over 12 common databases, including MySQL and PostgreSQL. This allows PHP to accept database query statements and have the capacity to handle the retrieval or input of data straight from PHP/HTML pages.
The future of PHP is already beginning to take shape where support for more object-oriented functions is beginning to bubble to the surface. Developments like this will permit the language to compete with other emerging web focused languages like JSP.
Finally, with the growth of web services, it highlights the importance of a flexible scripting language like PHP. It’s easy to understand syntax and developers’ support make it ideal for beginners. More importantly, the wide public appeal of the language ensures the potential for PHP to enter market segments dominated by other languages including ASP and Coldfusion. It is indeed one of the reasons why it is the fastest growing server side language.
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