Project- PHP Web Application Development Innovation
COURTESY :- vrindawan.in
Wikipedia
PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter implemented as a module, a daemon or as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executable. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code – which may be any type of data, such as generated HTML or binary image data – would form the whole or part of an HTTP response. Various web template systems, web content management systems, and web frameworks exist which can be employed to orchestrate or facilitate the generation of that response. Additionally, PHP can be used for many programming tasks outside the web context, such as standalone graphical applications and robotic drone control. PHP code can also be directly executed from the command line.
The standard PHP interpreter, powered by the Zend Engine, is free software released under the PHP License. PHP has been widely ported and can be deployed on most web servers on a variety of operating systems and platforms.
The PHP language evolved without a written formal specification or standard until 2014, with the original implementation acting as the de facto standard which other implementations aimed to follow. Since 2014, work has gone on to create a formal PHP specification.
W3Techs reports that, as of October 2022, “PHP is used by 74.4% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.” PHP version 7.4 is the most used version. Support for version 7.3 was dropped on 6 December 2021.
PHP development began in 1993 when Rasmus Lerdorf wrote several Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs in C, which he used to maintain his personal homepage. He extended them to work with web forms and to communicate with databases, and called this implementation “Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter” or PHP/FI.
PHP/FI could be used to build simple, dynamic web applications. To accelerate bug reporting and improve the code, Lerdorf initially announced the release of PHP/FI as “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0” on the Usenet discussion group comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi on June 8, 1995. This release already had the basic functionality that PHP has today. This included Perl-like variables, form handling, and the ability to embed HTML. The syntax resembled that of Perl, but was simpler, more limited and less consistent.
A web application (or web app) is application software that runs in a web browser, unlike software programs that run locally and natively on the operating system (OS) of the device. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection.
In earlier computing models like client-server, the processing load for the application was shared between code on the server and code installed on each client locally. In other words, an application had its own pre-compiled client program which served as its user interface and had to be separately installed on each user’s personal computer. An upgrade to the server-side code of the application would typically also require an upgrade to the client-side code installed on each user workstation, adding to the support cost and decreasing productivity. In addition, both the client and server components of the application were usually tightly bound to a particular computer architecture and operating system and porting them to others was often prohibitively expensive for all but the largest applications (Nowadays, native apps for mobile devices are also hobbled by some or all of the foregoing issues).
In 1995, Netscape introduced a client-side scripting language called JavaScript allowing programmers to add some dynamic elements to the user interface that ran on the client side. So instead of sending data to the server in order to generate an entire web page, the embedded scripts of the downloaded page can perform various tasks such as input validation or showing/hiding parts of the page.
In 1999, the “web application” concept was introduced in the Java language in the Servlet Specification version 2.2. [2.1?]. At that time both JavaScript and XML had already been developed, but Ajax had still not yet been coined and the XMLHttpRequest object had only been recently introduced on Internet Explorer 5 as an ActiveX object.
In 2005, the term Ajax was coined, and applications like Gmail started to make their client sides more and more interactive. A web page script is able to contact the server for storing/retrieving data without downloading an entire web page.