PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

Introduction to World Wide Web and what PHP is.

Jibril Abdiqadir Ahmed
IT Engineer & lecturer
Feb. 2018
Agenda

 What is Internet and World Wide Web?

 Web Application Development
 What is PHP?
 PHP History
 Why PHP ?
 PHP – Online Popular Projects
 Installing PHP
 WAMP / XAMPP / LAMP Installation
 PHP Programming
What is Internet and World Wide Web?
 Internet – Global system of interconnected networks .
 It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and
government networks of local to global scope.
 Use TCP/IP to serve billions of users worldwide.
 Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and IPTV. Newspaper publishing, blogging, and web feeds.
 Human interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking sites.

 www – Collection of interconnected documents and other resources.

 System of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet.

 http – Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.

 Protocol to transfer hypertext docs from server to client.
 Hyperlink (or link) is a reference to a document that the reader can directly follow.
 Hypertext is text displayed with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can
immediately access.
Web Application Development

 Web application development is the process and practice of developing web

applications.
 Request / Response Model.
 In HTTP, web browsers or spiders typically act as clients, while an application
running on the computer hosting the web site acts as a server.
 Static vs. Dynamic web pages
 Server Side Scripting Languages
 J.S.P, ASP. Net Cold Fusion, Python, PHP
What is PHP?

 PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

 http://php.net
What is PHP?
 The PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) is a programming language that allows web
developers to create dynamic content that interacts with databases.
 PHP is basically used for developing web based software applications.
 PHP is a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also
used as a general-purpose programming language.
 Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 - 1995, the PHP reference
implementation is now produced by The PHP Group.
PHP History
 1994: Rasmus Lerdorf started working on what would later become PHP.
 1995: Release of PHP version 1.0, named “Personal Home Page Tools” (PHP tools)
 Collection of Perl/CGI scripts.
 PHP/FI was created initially as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online
resume.
 1998: Release of PHP 3.0 with parser rewritten by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans
 Lots of different databases, protocols and APIs
 Developers joined in and submit new extension modules
 PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
PHP History
 2000: PHP 4, powered by new core, “Zend Engine”
 Zend Engine Introduced in 1999
 Support for Web servers
 Object Oriented Programming
 2004: PHP 5
 Zend Engine 2.0
 XML and Web Services
 Improved Object Oriented Support
 Exception Handling
 A lot of new Features
 2009: Release of PHP 5.3 (instead PHP 6 – unicode support, project abanded)
PHP History
 2015: PHP 7
Current version on PHP is latest version of PHP with lot of improvement. Some of
new features are:
 Speed
 Type Declaration
 Return Type Declarations
 Error Handling Spaceship Operator
 Null Coalesce Operator ?? (isset and not emty)
 Unicode support for emoji and international characters.
 Constant arrays using define()
 Anonymous classes
 Generator delegation
Why PHP ?
 Open Source – Linux – Apache - PHP – MySQL
 One of top 5 most popular languages
 Small – medium – enterprise level applications
 Server Side Scripting
 Command Line
 Desktop Applications (PHP – GTK)
 Available for Windows, Linux, Mac Many Web Servers – Apache, IIS, nginx,
Lighthttpd
 Relational / No SQL Databases MySql, Oracle, MSSQL, mongoDB, PostgreSql
 Built in Support – Regex, XML and other functions math etc Services – LDAP, POP3
and so on
PHP – Online Popular Projects
 PHP
 Facebook - The world’s biggest social networking platform is written in PHP.
 150 million users and counting, and in my experience, significantly faster and
more stable than competing platforms written in other languages (e.g. MySpace).
 Yahoo! - formerly the world’s largest search engine. Yahoo! makes use of PHP.
 YouTube - the world’s biggest video sharing website uses PHP technology.
 Wikipedia - User contributed web encyclopedia has PHP elements.
 Digg.com Social news network.
 Sourceforge.org The world's largest Open Source software development web site.
 Flickr.com Online photo sharing and storing.
Installing PHP
 http://php.net/downloads.php
(Source code & Binaries)
 http://windows.php.net/
(Windows binaries)
 https://www.apachefriends.org
(All-in-One)
WAMP / XAMPP / MAMP/ LAMP Installation

 On windows WAMP, XAMPP or MAMP can be installed

 On MAC XAMPP or MAMP can be installed
 On Linux LAMP can be installed
 All of them runs
 Apache – a Web Server
 PHP - Server Side Language
 MySQL / MariaDB – DBMS - DataBase Management System
 PHPMyAdmin
 (PERL)
PHP Configuration
 PHP .ini
Php configuration file is read when php starts up. Values of different environment
variables can be set in php.ini file. Outputs a lot of data about the PHP installation
 Some of the features are:
 Version information
 Installed extension
 Server environment variables
 Execution time
 File upload size and so on
 Session paths
 Upload file size
 Short tags
 Error reporting
 Safe mode
PHP Quick start.
PHP - ”Hello World!”
PHP Documentation
 Available at http://php.net/manual
 Shortcut specific word. http://php.net/abc eg.
 http://php.net/phpinfo
 http://php.net/install
 http://php.net/install.windows
 Also available for download and offline browsing (download all php manual)
PHP Basics
Language Constructs:
 Constructs are elements that are built-into the language.
 Echo
 Echo 10;
 Every statement ends with semi colon.

Comments
 Single line comments –
// this is a single line comment
# this is a single line comment
 Multi Line Comments - /* ….. */
/* This is a Multi line comment
*/
Summary
 PHP is the most popular server language for the web
 PHP runs on all relevant server operating systems
 XAMPP, WAMP, MAMP and LAMP installation
 php.ini Php configuration file.
 phpinfo() provides all information about the current PHP installation
 The PHP manual at http://php.net/manual