What is PHP?
PHP is a server-side scripting language (scripting language: A simple programming language designed to perform special or limited tasks, sometimes associated with a particular application or function.) that you can embed into HTML when you create dynamic Web pages. PHP is an open-source product that you can use, alter, and redistribute without charge. Originally PHP stood for Personal Home Page tool, but over time it has evolved to stand for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
In general, dynamic Web pages are pages that interact with users, so that each site visitor sees customized information. In the case of PHP, dynamic also means that data is pulled from a database. Dynamic Web applications are prevalent in commercial (e-commerce) sites, where the content displayed is generated from information that is accessed from a database or other external source.
PHP's syntax is similar to that of C and Perl, making it easy to learn for anyone with basic programming skills. PHP supports only partial encapsulation (such as support for declaring methods and fields in the class) and partial polymorphism (no overloading, no abstraction). With PHP, there is no concept of private, public, or protected functions in classes as well as in the overloading.
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