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{{Infobox programming language| name = PHP| logo = | designer =
Rasmus Lerdorf [2007| paradigm = [Imperative programming, Object-oriented programming| year = 1995| typing = Dynamic, weak (
duck typing)]| website = http://php.net/| influenced_by = C (programming language), Perl
Java (programming language), C++, Python (programming language)-->
PHP is a reflection (computer science)
programming language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. PHP is used mainly in
server-side scripting, but can be used from a
command line interface or in standalone
Graphical user interface. Text user interface can also be created using
ncurses. PHP is a recursive initialism for
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
The main implementation is produced by The
PHP Group (group) and released under the
PHP License. This implementation serves to define a
de facto standard for PHP, as there is no
formal specification.The most recent version of PHP is 5.2.4, released on
30 August 2007. It is considered to be
free software by the
Free Software Foundation.
History
PHP was written as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries in the C (programming language) by the Danish/Greenlandic programmer
Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, to replace a small set of
Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his
personal homepage. Lerdorf initially created PHP to display his
résumé and to collect certain data, such as how much traffic his page was receiving.
Personal Home Page Tools was publicly released on
8 June 1995 after Lerdorf combined it with his own
Form Interpreter to create
PHP/FI (this release is considered PHP version 2).
Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two Israeli developers at the Technion IIT, rewrote the
parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive initialism
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of development stage#beta testing. Public testing of PHP 3 began and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a
Rewrite (programming) of PHP's core, producing the
Zend Engine in 1999. They also founded
Zend Technologies in
Ramat Gan, Israel, which actively manages the development of PHP.
In May 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. The most recent update released by The PHP Group, is for the older PHP version 4 code branch which, as of
May 2007, is up to version 4.4.7. PHP 4 will be supported by security updates until August 8, 2008. php.net 2007 news archive
On July 13
2004, PHP 5 was released powered by the new Zend Engine II. PHP 5 included new features such as:http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2004/07/15/UpgradePHP5.html
- Improved support for object-oriented programming
- The PHP Data Objects extension, which defines a lightweight and consistent interface for accessing databases
- Performance enhancements
- Better support for MySQL and MSSQL
- Embedded support for SQLite
- Integrated SOAP support
- Data iterators
- Error handling via Exception handling
Currently, two major versions of PHP are being actively developed: 5.x and 4.4.x. The latest stable version, PHP 5.2.4, was released on
Aug 30, 2007. On July 13, 2007, the PHP group announced that active development on PHP4 will cease by
December 31, 2007, however, critical security updates will be provided until August 8,
2008. php.net 2007 news archive PHP 6 is currently under development, and is slated to release in conjunction with the decommission of PHP 4.
Usage
PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for
Web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating Web pages as output. However, it can also be used for
command-line scripting and client-side
Graphical user interface applications. PHP can be deployed on most
web servers and on almost every
operating system and
Platform (computing) free of charge. The PHP Group also provides the complete source code for users to build, customize and extend for their own use.
PHP primarily acts as a
Filter (software). The PHP program takes input from a file or stream containing text and special PHP instructions and outputs another stream of data for display.
From PHP 4, the PHP parser compilers input to produce
bytecode for processing by the Zend Engine, giving improved performance over its
Interpreter (computing) predecessor. PHP 5 uses the Zend Engine II.
Server-side scripting
Originally designed to create dynamic web pages, PHP's principal focus is
server-side scripting.While running the PHP
parser with a web server and
web browser, the PHP model can be compared to other server-side scripting languages such as
Microsoft's ASP.NET system, Sun Microsystems'
JavaServer Pages, mod_perl and the Ruby on Rails framework, as they all provide dynamic content to the client (computing) from a web server. To more directly compete with the "framework" approach taken by these systems, Zend is working on the Zend Framework - an emerging (as of June 2006) set of PHP building blocks and best practices; other
List of web application frameworks along the same lines include CakePHP,
PRADO and
Symfony.
The
LAMP (software bundle) architecture has become popular in the Web industry as a way of deploying inexpensive, reliable, scalable, secure web applications. PHP is commonly used as the
P in this bundle alongside
Linux,
Apache HTTP Server and
MySQL, although the
P can also refer to Python (programming language) or Perl. PHP can be used with a large number of relational database management systems, runs on all of the most popular web servers and is available for many different operating systems. This flexibility means that PHP has a wide installation base across the Internet; over
19 million Internet domains are currently hosted on servers with PHP installed.http://php.net/usage.php
Examples of popular server-side PHP applications include
phpBB, WordPress, and
MediaWiki.
Command-line scripting
PHP also provides a command line interface Server Application Programming Interface for developing shell and desktop applications, daemons, log parsing, or other system administration tasks. PHP is increasingly used on the command line for tasks that have traditionally been the domain of Perl,
Python (programming language),
awk, or
shell scripting.http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-command-line-1
Client-side GUI applications
PHP provides bindings to Graphical user interface libraries such as GTK+ (with PHP-GTK),
Qt (toolkit) with PHP-Qt and text mode libraries like ncurses in order to facilitate development of a broader range of
cross-platform GUI applications.
Syntax
The usual
Hello World code example for PHP is:
PHP only parses code within its
delimiters, such as . Anything outside its delimiters is sent directly to the output and not parsed by PHP. The example above is equivalent to the following text (and indeed is converted into this form):
Hello, World!
The primary use of this is to allow PHP statements to be embedded within HTML documents, for example:
Hello
Variables are prefixed with a dollar sign and a
primitive type does not need to be specified in advance. Unlike function and class names, variable names are case sensitive. Both double-quoted ("") and heredoc strings allow the ability to embed the variable's value into the string.
PHP treats new lines as whitespace (computer science), in the manner of a
free-form language (except when inside string quotes). Statements are terminated by a semicolon, except in a few special cases.
PHP has three types of Comparison of programming languages (syntax)#Comments: /* */ which serves as block comments, and // as well as # which is used for inline comments.
It should be noted that many examples use the print function instead of the echo function; the two are practically identical, and one may decide which one to use based on his personal preference.
Data types
PHP stores whole numbers in a platform-dependent range. This range is typically that of 32-bit signed integers. Integer variables can be assigned using decimal (positive and negative), octal and hexadecimal notations.
Real numbers are also stored in a platform-specific range. They can be specified using
floating point notation, or two forms of scientific notation.
PHP has a native
Boolean type, named "boolean", similar to the native Boolean types in Java (programming language) and C++. Using the Boolean type conversion rules, non-zero values can be interpreted as true and zero as false, as in Perl.
There are eight data types in PHP:
Integer
Double precision
Boolean datatype
String (computer science)
Object (computer science)
Array
Null (computer)
Resource (computer science)
The null data type represents a variable that has no value. The only value in the null data type is
NULL.
Variables of the "resource" type represent references to resources from external sources. These are typically created by functions from a particular extension, and can only be processed by functions from the same extension. Examples include file, image and database resources.
Arrays support both numeric and string indices, and are heterogeneous. Arrays can contain elements of any type that PHP can handle, including resources, objects, and even other arrays. Order is preserved in lists of values and in
Hash table with both keys and values, and the two can be intermingled.
Objects
Basic
Object-oriented programming functionality was added in PHP 3. Handling of objects was completely rewritten for PHP 5, allowing for better performance and more features. In previous versions of PHP, objects were handled like primitive types. The drawback of this method was that the whole object was copied when a variable was assigned, or passed as a parameter to a method. In the new approach, objects are referenced by smart pointer#Handles, and not by value. PHP 5 introduced private and protected
member variables and methods, along with
Class (computer science)#Abstract and concrete classes and
abstract methods. It also introduced a standard way of declaring
constructor (computer science) and destructor (computer science) similar to that of other object-oriented languages, such as C++, and an exception handling model similar to that of other programming languages.
The static method and class variable features in Zend Engine 2 do not work the way some expect. There is no virtual table feature in the engine, so the
static variables are bound with a name at compile time instead of with a reference.
class foo extends bar{ function __construct()
{
}
public static function mystaticfunc()
{
}
}
The above very basic example shows how to define a class, foo, that inherits from class bar.Additionally, the function, mystaticfunc, is a public static function that is called with foo::mystaticfunc();.
If the developer asks to create a copy of an object by using the reserved word
clone, the Zend engine will check if a __clone() method has been defined or not. If not, it will call a default __clone() which will copy all of the object's properties. If a __clone() method is defined, then it will be responsible for setting the necessary properties in the created object. For convenience, the engine will supply a function that imports all of the properties from the source object, so that they can start with a by-value wiktionary:replica of the source object, and only override properties that need to be changed.
Resources
Libraries
PHP includes a large number of free and open source libraries with the core build. PHP is a fundamentally Internet-aware system with modules built in for accessing
File transfer protocol servers, many database servers, embedded SQL libraries such as embedded
MySQL and
SQLite, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol servers, and others. Many functions familiar to C programmers such as those in the
stdio.h family are available in the standard PHP build.
Extension
PHP allows developers to write extension (computing)s in
C (programming language) to add functionality to the PHP language. These can then be compiled into PHP or loaded dynamically at runtime. Extensions have been written to add support for the Windows API, process management on
Unix-like operating systems, multibyte strings (
Unicode), cURL, and several popular
compression formats. Some more unusual features include integration with Internet relay chat, dynamic generation of images and Adobe Flash content, and even
speech synthesis. The
PHP Extension Community Library (PECL) project is a repository for extensions to the PHP language.
Source code encoders, optimizers and accelerators
As with many scripting languages, PHP scripts are normally kept as human-readable source code, even on production webservers. While this allows flexibility, it can raise issues with security and performance.
Encoders hinder source code
reverse engineering. Encoders fall broadly into two types; those that hide source code and those that compile code into "optcode" . The downside of this latter approach is that a special extension has to be installed on the server in order to run encoded scripts, however the approach of encoding compiled code and use of an extension offers typically the best performance, security and opportunity for additional features that may be useful for developers. Compiled code solutions may exploit the potential for increased security through the use of their own execution engine, although some simpler solutions rely on the regular PHP engine to execute the compiled code. The most commonly used packages for source code protection are from Zend Technologies and
ionCube Ltd.Code optimizers improve the quality of the compiled code by reducing its size and making changes that can reduce the execution time and improve performance. The nature of the PHP
compiler is such that there are often many opportunities for optimization (computer science).
Accelerators offer performance gains by caching the compiled form of a PHP script in
shared memory to avoid the overhead of
parsing and compiling the code every time the script runs. They may also perform
code optimization to provide increased execution performance. Both commercial (e.g. Zend Platform) and open source accelerators (e.g. xcache, eAccelerator, APC) are available.
Debuggers and profilers
Debuggers and profiler (computer science)s allow developers to analyze running PHP code for potential and noted
software bugs and bottlenecks. Examples of such software for PHP include Advanced PHP Debugger and Xdebug.
Templating engines
Templating engines provide
Macro (computer science) that allow PHP applications to uniformly identify common variables. One popular templating engine is
Smarty. PHP itself makes a good templating engine.
PEAR
The
PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) project aims to provide reusable libraries and components for PHP development. PEAR projects are usually written in PHP code using the Object-oriented programming paradigm.
Code Generators
There are PHP code generators which will automate common programming tasks such as creating HTML data entry forms, reports, connecting to databases, (e.g., MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, etc.) and email applications. Code generators save lots of time and eliminate many common bugs due to typos in the source code.
Support
PHP has a formal development manual that is maintained by the
free software community. In addition, answers to many questions can often be found by doing a simple internet search. PHP users assist each other through various media such as chat, forums, newsgroups and PHP developer web sites. In turn, the PHP development team actively participates in such communities, garnering assistance from them in their own development effort (PHP itself) and providing assistance to them as well. There are many help resourceshttp://php.net/support available for the novice PHP programmer.
Criticism
Criticisms of PHP include those ascribed to scripting languages and Type systems in general, such as low performance for general-purpose computation. The list below includes criticisms specific to PHP, some of which have been rectified in recent versions.
- PHP originally inserted data received over the network directly into the Global variable namespace register_globals, leading to confusion between trusted and untrusted data, and unnecessary potential for security holes in PHP applications. This behavior was turned off by default from version 4.2.0 released in April 2002. PHP Manual: Chapter 29. Using Register Globals However, this feature is still being used by some legacy applicationshttp://www.oscommerce.info/kb/osCommerce/Installation_and_Upgrades/46.
- PHP has traditionally used features such as "Magic quotes" and "magic_quotes_runtime" which attempt to escape apostrophes (') and quotes (") in strings in the assumption that they will be used in databases, to prevent SQL injection attacks. This leads to confusion over which data is escaped and which is not, and to problems when data is not in fact used as input to a database. Rasmus Lerdorf's thoughts about PHP6
- PHP does not have complete native support for Unicode or multibyte strings. Overview of PHP function which are currently Unicode compatible (in Concurrent Versions System)
- PHP does not enforce the declaration of variables prior to their use, and variables which have not been initialized can have operations (such as concatenation) performed on them; an operation on an uninitialized variable raises an E_NOTICE level error, but this is hidden by default.
- PHP has no Namespace (computer science) support, which leads to a very large amount of globally available functions that can easily number into the thousands.
- PHP's dynamic type conversion could potentially cause problems. Variable types in PHP, although they exist, are transparent to the programmer. Some may consider this a feature, as a variable can change from a Integer (computer science) to a String (computer science) and back again without extra lines of code. However, variable type errors are not detected at compile-time, and the dynamic-typing behavior lacks full predictability.
- The standard function library lacks internal consistency. Many functions perform relatively similar actions and have different name standards and argument orders. For example:
- Argument consistency: strpos($haystack, $needle) vs. in_array($needle, $haystack)
- Naming convention: both of these work case-insensitively strcasecmp() vs. stristr() but the former indicates this with "case" while the later does with "i"
- Function Naming conventions (programming): strpos() vs. str_replace()
- Destructive changes of function behaviour between releases:
- tempnam() used to just return a filename prior to PHP 4.0.3. Now it also creates the file which could make some older scripts incoherent if they didn't intend to create it. One such usage is demonstrated in the official PHP manual itself (http://php.net/is_uploaded_file) where the function is used to get the path of the directory where temporary files are written.
- strtotime() went through several behaviour changes. Prior to PHP 4.4.0 and in PHP 5.0 - 5.0.2 it even returned results inconsistent with the documentation when called with specific parameters (Marked as warnings here: http://php.net/strtotime). Still more changes were detected by users (see http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=36266)
- for range() the manual says that it treats strings of numbers as strings not integers in PHP 4.1.0 - 4.3.2 presumably meaning that in other versions it treats them as integers.
- array_search() returns null on failure instead of false prior to PHP 4.2.0. Which makes a difference if strict type matching is used to check for failure. Same is true for ftruncate().
- Functions are not first-class objects. This requires referencing functions by strings and object methods as a two-element array of the object and method name as a string. Consequently, anonymous functions are also referenced by string.
- Lack of late static binding http://www.digitalsandwich.com/archives/53-Late-Static-Binding-in-PHP.html retrieved March 28, 2007
- Some portability issues with 32-bit and 64-bit integers, and sometimes unsigned integers get converted to signed values.
Release history of major versions
{| class="wikitable"|-!Version!style="width:10em"|Release date!Most important changes|-|PHP 1.0|June 8,
1995, [1996, [1998, [2000 http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-4.php#4.2.0],
2001 http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-4.php#4.2.0],
2002 http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-4.php#4.2.0],
2002 http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-4.php#4.4.0], 2005 http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-4.php#4.4.0],
2004 http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.0.0],
2005 http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.1.0], 2006 http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.2.0|Enabled the filter extension by default|}
Future development
PHP 6, in development as of July 2007, aims to address some of PHP 5's shortcomings.http://www.php.net/~derick/meeting-notes.htmlhttp://www.corephp.co.uk/archives/19-Prepare-for-PHP-6.html
- Namespace support will be added.
- Native Unicode support will be added.
- The magic_quotes option will be removed.
- The HTTP_*_VARS global variables will be removed.
- The register_globals option will be removed.
- The safe_mode option will be removed.
- Late static binding will be added.
Implementations
There are a number of alternative implementations of the PHP language in addition to the reference implementation hosted at php.net.
{| class="wikitable"|-! Name! Technology!Significant features|-| php.net http://www.php.net| Dedicated virtual machine implemented in C executing bespoke opcodes.| De-facto reference implementation. Used for almost all PHP websites in use in 2007.|-| Roadsend http://www.roadsend.com/home/index.php?pageID=compiler| Compiles PHP source to native stand alone binaries.| PHP4 support only.|-| Quercus http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/| Runtime implemented in Java (programming language) running on a Java 5 SE Virtual Machine.| Pure Java implementation which runs a number of popular PHP applications.|-| Phalanger http://www.phpcompiler.net| PHP compiler compiles to
MSIL on Microsoft's .NET platform.| Can re-use extensions designed to work with the PHP.net implementation. Claims support for a number of PHP applications.|-| Project Zero http://www.projectzero.org/wiki/bin/view/Documentation/PhpDevelopersGuide| Runtime implemented in Java running on a Java 5 SE Virtual Machine.| Java based runtime which can use extensions implemented in either C or Java.|}
See also
References
Further reading
External links
- Official PHP website
- Zend website
- Pear Project
-
- Do You PHP? by Rasmus Lerdorf
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