For those that are unfamiliar with PHP, what is stands for, and what it is capable of, there are some introductions in order. The term “PHP” stands for Personal Home Page, implying a framework suited most specifically to website development and web-based applications development. It’s popular due to it’s non-reliance on traditional, proprietary software. In other words, no licenses are required to implement it. It is entirely open source. That “buzzword” alone should clue you in to its present and future significance. PHP belongs to nobody, much like MySQL, Apache Server, et al. This is key for several reasons. We’ll hit these in the following.
The future of the web, nay, the future of humankind, information sharing, and progress, lies within the field of open source software. The giants of software engineering may have not clued in yet, but the response from the actual users and creators of web services is unanimous: open source all the way. As a back-end programming paradigm, PHP is the ultimate blend of reliability, ubiquity, and transparency. Here’s what all of that means. PHP handles all of the true “guts” of rich media and websites for a huge swath of the Internet. PHP handles the manipulation of data, requests for information, any non graphical “works” of a decent site, like shopping carts for online retailers, email routing, database integration, and the like. While JavaScript and CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, are essential for the look and feel of a website, the real work in the background, communicating between the browser a user runs, and the server handling the heavy stuff, is done by PHP.
It’s easy, reliable, well supported and used throughout the web development community, and will only increase in popularity as time goes by. It can handle both simple and large, complex operations and again, most importantly, is open source. That means anyone can examine how PHP functions and does its job, and contribute suggestions that can make it better, more responsive, and ultimately more useful to websites and applications that reside within “the Cloud” of the Internet, as more and more software and applications do so. If you’re looking to get into web development, or already run an e-commerce business online, there’s every reason to look into getting up to date and integrating PHP into your routine as soon as possible.
