PHP is an open source server-side script­ing lan­guage that is very sim­i­lar in syn­tax to C lan­guages. Although orig­i­nally designed to run under Linux using the Apache Web server, it has been ported to work using vir­tu­ally every oper­at­ing sys­tem and any standards-compliant Web server soft­ware. From this it can be derived three of the pri­mary advan­tages of PHP. Firstly, it is a cross plat­form tech­nol­ogy and con­se­quently PHP appli­ca­tions can be very portable — depend­ing, of course, upon any addi­tional com­po­nents they are built to incor­po­rate, such as ven­dor spe­cific data­bases etc. This porta­bil­ity incurs an addi­tional ben­e­fit by virtue of the fact that most Web host­ing providers sup­port PHP, mak­ing it fairly easy to change hosts if necessary.

Sec­ondly, because PHP bears so much resem­blance to C pro­gram­ming lan­guages, it is very eas­ily picked up by devel­op­ers famil­iar with this syn­tax — one that is shared by Java, JavaScript and Perl, amongst oth­ers. Thirdly, being open source, PHP is con­stantly evolv­ing and, more impor­tantly, bug fixes are being reg­u­larly imple­mented to the core libraries, which are freely available.

In addi­tion to these ben­e­fits, there are cer­tain pro­gram­ming require­ments that may make PHP an appeal­ing choice for devel­op­ers. Firstly, there are built-in libraries for the direct cre­ation and manip­u­la­tion of image and PDF doc­u­ments. This means, for exam­ple, that if an appli­ca­tion calls for dynamically-created menu images with anti-aliased text, or the export­ing of pages to Acro­bat for­mat, PHP may be the ideal tech­nol­ogy to do it. Although these fea­tures are the­o­ret­i­cally avail­able to com­pet­ing tech­nolo­gies, they usu­ally require the instal­la­tion of third party cus­tom com­po­nents to do so.

Another sit­u­a­tion that may make PHP the best choice of server script­ing is where con­nect­ing to either mySQL or Post­gres data­bases is required. Although mySQL and Post­gres are avail­able to ASP via an ODBC con­nec­tion, this usu­ally needs to be con­fig­ured exter­nally by the sys­tem admin­is­tra­tor. For­tu­nately, this lim­i­ta­tion has been over­come in ASP.NET, where a mySQL data provider is avail­able for direct data­base con­nec­tions akin to that used by MS SQL Server.