PHP (recursive acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor") is a widely-used Open Source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

What distinguishes PHP from something like client-side JavaScript is that the code is executed on the server. This allows only the results of the server compiled page to be returned to the broswer, with no way of determining what the underlying code is doing.

PHP gives us the freedom of choosing an operating system and a web server. Furthermore, it provides us with the choice of using procedural programming or object oriented programming, or a mixture of them.

PHP does not limit our output to HTML. PHP's abilities includes outputting images, PDF files and even Flash movies generated on the fly. We can also output easily any text, such as XHTML and any other XML file.

One of the strongest and most significant feature in PHP is its support for a wide range of databases. Although the list of supported databases is vast, we only use mySQL. Because it is FREE and provides all of the database functionality that any or our customers will ever need.

PHP also has support for talking to other services using protocols such as LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP, COM (on Windows) and countless others. PHP has support for the WDDX complex data exchange between virtually all Web programming languages. Talking about interconnection, PHP has support for instantiation of Java objects and using them transparently as PHP objects. You can also use our CORBA extension to access remote objects.

PHP has extremely useful text processing features, from the POSIX Extended or Perl regular expressions to parsing XML documents. For parsing and accessing XML documents, PHP supports the SAX and DOM standards. We can also use the XSLT extension to transform XML documents.