PHP definition

You really should read Lerdorf's paper from 1998 extract: http://www.newarchitectmag.com/archives/1998/02/lerdorf/ Dynamic Web Pages with PHP3 An Embedded Scripting Language for the Web By Rasmus Lerdorf PHP is a freely available, HTML-embedded scripting language that lets you embed special tags to create your script right in an HTML file. PHP can be integrated into the Web server itself, eliminating the need to start up a separate CGI program to generate the Web page, which can lead to dramatic performance increases on some systems. In this article, I'll describe how PHP came into existence, introduce some PHP basics, then share some useful, instructive scripts to get you started. PHP3 History PHP began as a simple CGI wrapper written in Perl that I used to keep track of who had accessed my online resume. I then rewrote the wrapper in C to speed it up and use less resources. At the same time, I needed a way to glue my home page to a database, so I wrote the Form Interpreter (FI), a tool to embed SQL queries inside Web pages and handle form input. These tools were never intended for public use, but as so often happens, people who saw my Web pages asked for a copy of what I was using. So, I bundled up my two tools, named them the Personal Home Page Tools, and added some documentation; thus was born PHP version 1.0. .......... Why not really tell it as it was not what you think it is! Regards