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PHP on MacOS X Server - a nice fit indeed

For those of you who don't know PHP from any of the other rampant technology acronyms, PHP is a hypertext preprocessor. Yes, that's right, a hypertext preprocessor.

For those of you who don't know what a hypertext preprocessor is, it's a nice way of basically saying server-side scripting.

 

PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. Yes, this is one of those silly things that computer people do!

PHP is a very powerful, stable, and rich server-side hypertext preprocessor which allows Web-programmers to create a wide variety of dynamic content while utilizing a very C-like syntax. There is some object support, and a few Perl- and Java-isms. All in all, it is a very easy language for anyone with even mediocre C, programming, and Internet knowledge.

Not only is the syntax familiar to almost everyone who has ever programmed in C or Java, but it is also a very intuitive experience. With straghtforward and well-documented functions, the only real learning curve is getting used to programming Web pages, and getting used to the options at hand. You can create functions, and classes, and objects, and rudimentary constructors, and whatever you like. And if you want more…there's more.

PHP comes equipped with support for SNMP, IMAP, LDAP, NNTP, NIS, HTTP and the very easy creation of mail. And if that's not enough (and it's not), there's always the ability to use raw network sockets, and given the proper expertise, other protocols as well.

Best of all, however, is the amazing database connectivity which comes standard with the latest distributions of PHP 3:

Abadas D

dBase

Empress

FilePro

Informix

InterBase

mSQL

MySQL

Oracle

PostgreSQL

Solid

Sybase

Velocis

Unix dbm

 

With the tools to interact with all of these types of servers, PHP allows you the very real flexibility to create any type of site you would like, including e-commerce and more.

For more information on PHP, visit the PHP website.
 

Why dynamic? 

Most of the pages which are continually updated on the Web are usually dynamic. They are the pages with suffixes such as .shtml (Apache server scripting), .php3, .phtml, (both PHP), .asp (Microsoft Active Server Pages), .pl (pages using Perl), and many more. All of these pages are actually custom-generated whenever you visit them.

Whereas nearly 100% of every .html or .htm page you come to is completely static, dynamic pages give information providers the ability to generate content on the fly. Perhaps you want to customize pages if a Mac user visits it, and make it completely different if a Windows user visits. Or perhaps you might want to generate Netscape-specific tags for Netscape pages, IE-specific tags for IE users, and plain ol' HTML 4.0 Strict tags for any other browser.

 

Next Page: Examples

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All content - ©1998-2009 - Mark J. Hershenson

 

 

 

 

 

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