svn: /phpdoc/en/trunk/chapters/ intro.xml

philip Thu, 23 Dec 2010 18:42:42 +0000 Revision: http://svn.php.net/viewvc?view=revision&revision=306589 Log: Updated "what can PHP do" to reflect the PHP of today. Closes PHP bug #51343. This updates DB, XML, Web Server, and a few other parts. Could probably use additional updates. Bug: http://bugs.php.net/51343 (Assigned) http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro-whatcando.php is out of date. Changed paths: U phpdoc/en/trunk/chapters/intro.xml Modified: phpdoc/en/trunk/chapters/intro.xml =================================================================== --- phpdoc/en/trunk/chapters/intro.xml 2010-12-23 14:38:15 UTC (rev 306588) +++ phpdoc/en/trunk/chapters/intro.xml 2010-12-23 18:42:42 UTC (rev 306589) @@ -128,27 +128,19 @@ </itemizedlist> </para> <para> - PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including + PHP can be <link linkend="install">used</link> on all major operating systems, including Linux, many Unix variants (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS, and probably others. PHP has also support for most of the web servers today. This - includes Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, - Personal Web Server, Netscape and iPlanet servers, Oreilly - Website Pro server, Caudium, Xitami, OmniHTTPd, and many - others. For the majority of the servers, PHP has a module, - for the others supporting the CGI standard, PHP can work - as a CGI processor. + includes Apache, IIS, and many others. And this includes any + web server that can utilize the FastCGI PHP binary, like lighttpd + and nginx. PHP works as either a module, or as a CGI processor. </para> <para> So with PHP, you have the freedom of choosing an operating system and a web server. Furthermore, you also have the choice of using procedural programming or object oriented - programming, or a mixture of them. Although not every - standard OOP feature is implemented in PHP 4, - many code libraries and large applications (including - the PEAR library) are written only using OOP code. PHP 5 fixes the - OOP related weaknesses of PHP 4, and introduces a complete object - model. + programming (OOP), or a mixture of them both. </para> <para> With PHP you are not limited to output HTML. PHP's abilities @@ -161,40 +153,14 @@ </para> <para> One of the strongest and most significant features in PHP is its - support for a wide range of databases. Writing a database-enabled - web page is incredibly simple. The following databases are currently - supported: - <blockquote> - <simplelist columns="3"> - <member>Adabas D</member> - <member>dBase</member> - <member>Empress</member> - <member>FilePro (read-only)</member> - <member>Hyperwave</member> - <member>IBM DB2</member> - <member>Informix</member> - <member>Ingres</member> - <member>InterBase</member> - <member>FrontBase</member> - <member>mSQL</member> - <member>Direct MS-SQL</member> - <member>MySQL</member> - <member>ODBC</member> - <member>Oracle (OCI7 and OCI8)</member> - <member>Ovrimos</member> - <member>PostgreSQL</member> - <member>SQLite</member> - <member>Solid</member> - <member>Sybase</member> - <member>Velocis</member> - <member>Unix dbm</member> - </simplelist> - </blockquote> - We also have a database abstraction extension (named PDO) allowing you - to transparently use any database supported by that extension. - Additionally PHP supports ODBC, the Open Database Connection - standard, so you can connect to any other database supporting - this world standard. + support for a <link linkend="refs.database">wide range of databases</link>. + Writing a database-enabled web page is incredibly simple using one of + the database specific extensions (e.g., for <link linkend="book.mysqli">mysql</link>), + or using an abstraction layer like <link linkend="book.pdo">PDO</link>, or connect + to any database supporting the Open Database Connection standard via the + <link linkend="book.uodbc">ODBC</link> extension. Other databases may utilize + <link linkend="book.curl">cURL</link> or <link linkend="book.sockets">sockets</link>, + like CouchDB. </para> <para> PHP also has support for talking to other services using protocols @@ -204,23 +170,21 @@ complex data exchange between virtually all Web programming languages. Talking about interconnection, PHP has support for instantiation of Java objects and using them transparently - as PHP objects. You can also use our CORBA extension to - access remote objects. + as PHP objects. </para> <para> - PHP has extremely useful text processing features, from the - POSIX Extended or Perl regular expressions to parsing XML - documents. For parsing and accessing XML documents, PHP 4 - supports the SAX and DOM standards, and you can also use the - XSLT extension to transform XML documents. PHP 5 standardizes - all the XML extensions on the solid base of libxml2 and extends - the feature set adding SimpleXML and XMLReader support. + PHP has useful <link linkend="refs.basic.text">text processing</link> features, + which includes the Perl compatible regular expressions (<link linkend="book.pcre">PCRE</link>), + and many extensions and tools to <link linkend="refs.xml">parse and access XML documents</link> + PHP standardizes all of the XML extensions on the solid base of <link linkend="book.libxml">libxml2</link>, + and extends the feature set adding <link linkend="book.simplexml">SimpleXML</link>, + <link linkend="book.xmlreader">XMLReader</link> and <link linkend="book.xmlreader">XMLReader</link> support. </para> <para> - At last but not least, we have many other interesting - extensions, the mnoGoSearch search engine functions, - the IRC Gateway functions, many compression utilities - (gzip, bz2, zip), calendar conversion, translation... + And many other interesting extensions exist, which are categorized both + <link linkend="extensions">alphabetically</link> and by <link linkend="funcref">category</link>. + And there are additional PECL extensions that may or may not be documented + within the PHP manual itself, like <link xlink:href="&url.xdebug;">XDebug</link>. </para> <para> As you can see this page is not enough to list all