CS310 Complete Handouts by Wahab Ahmad and Fatima Ali

Topic: Introduction to PHP

PHP

 PHP is a server scripting language, and a powerful tool for making dynamic and interactive Web pages.  PHP is a widely-used, free, and efficient alternative to competitors such as Microsoft's ASP.  While PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, it now stands for (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), which is a recursive acronym.  P -> PHP  H -> Hypertext  P -> Preprocessor  It is powerful enough to be at the core of the biggest blogging system on the web (WordPress)!

 It is also easy enough to be a beginner's first server side language!

Topic: What PHP can do

 PHP can generate dynamic page content  PHP can create, open, read, write, delete, and close files on the server  PHP can collect form data  PHP can send and receive cookies  PHP can add, delete, modify data in your database  PHP can be used to control user-access  PHP can encrypt data  With PHP, you are not limited to output HTML.  You can output  Images  PDF files  Flash movies  XHTML  XML.

Topic: Why PHP

 PHP runs on various platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc.)  PHP is compatible with almost all servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc.)  PHP supports a wide range of databases like MySQL, MS Access, MS SQL Server, Oracle, etc  PHP is free.  PHP is easy to learn and runs efficiently on the server side  PHP is FREE  It runs on Linux which is FREE  It supports MySQL Free  It runs on Apache which is also free  That is why most of the time hosting of PHP is cheap.

Topic: Basic PHP syntax

 A PHP script can be placed anywhere in the document.  A PHP script starts with <?php and ends with ?>:  <?php // PHP code goes here

 Extension of PHP page should be .php  PHP statements end with a semicolon (;)

Topic: Installation and Configuration of WAMP server

To get the PHP running at your computer you will need to

 install a web server  install PHP  install a database, such as MySQL

The official PHP website ( ) has installation instructions for

 Installation and configuration process of PHP can be easily done using Bundled Software know as LAMP and WAMP  LAMP Stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.  WAMP is Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP.  We will be using a WAMP bundle  This is an open source platform.  WAMP Server works on Windows Operating System only.  WAMP is a combine package of Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

VertrigoServ is easy to install package consisting of

 Apache (HTTP web server)  PHP (Server Side Scripting)  MySQL (SQL Database Management System)  PhpMyAdmin (tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL)

Hello World in PHP

<html> <body>

<h1> My first PHP page</h1>

<? php echo " Hello World!";

</body> </html>