What Is PHP?

The World Wide Web has changed very fast in so many ways. Sometimes it seems like yesterday that a
little known markup language with a strange name HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) was used by
some physicists to link scientific documents at a group of CERN servers. It was wondrous to read some
text somewhere in the world with just a simple program, and what is more information in the document
could magically transport you to another one with related information.
And this spread relatively quickly to other sciences. Text-only interfaces were the norm, and simplicity
of accessing information content the most important part of the equation. Text documents with a small
set of tags and a simple server setup was all you needed to inform your colleagues and share the
knowledge, independently of whether the organic chemist at the other end was using his trusty Mac, or
the theoretician was using her Unix box, or the impoverished graduate was using a second or third
hand PC running very flaky TCP/IP software.
Nowadays we expect more, much more than this. We expect a web site with lots of information, and a
good presentation, but we do not want to be distracted by a difficult interface. The information should
be easy to find, and it should be current. A clean and dynamic web site is a great asset for the user and
for the information provider. Long gone (fortunately) are the days of garish-looking web sites with
blinky thingies, lots of animated images that usually were hiding a shallow content depth. We want
information, we want it 5 minutes ago and we want it in the way we like it.
A modern web site is not just a web server; it also includes a way of storing data and querying (a SQL
database perhaps), a way of processing the requests from the user and creating documents with the
appropriate information. Many are the options open to the web developer, but not all of them as open
and general as others. We should not only consider the immediate task at hand of creating a site with
dynamic content, we need to be sure that we can still be providing the said content independently of
the changes in hardware or software technology.
We want to try and insure ourselves against future technology changes, dramatically reduce our license
costs, keep our hardware budget under control, and yet be portable to different web servers and
operating systems. We also want some assurance that we can do something about that killer bug we
just think we found in our web server or scripting environment, be able to understand (if we want to)
how the scripting works, and be able to modify the behavior of our web server or scripting host to meat
some particularly unusual need. Open source products will be your best assurance that your application
that works now in the "Super-Turbo Hexium IX" machine of today, will work in the "Nanotech Cube
Aleph" of tomorrow (I am exaggerating just a wee bit).