PHP demo
PHP - a powerful, cross-platform, open source, highly extensible, solution. And, in our opinion, unfairly ignored by the corporate world.
PHP (the name is a programmer's joke - it stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) is a technology that has grown in strength in recent years. It is a general-purpose scripting language that has many virtues, not least that it is a cross-platform, cross-server solution.PHP operates on both Windows and Linux machines and will run under a range of web servers including both IIS and Apache. Furthermore, it is freely downloadable from PHP.net - meaning not only that PHP hosting has traditionally been inexpensive, but that a wide base of enthusiastic developers have embraced the language (the syntax is relatively familiar for C, Java or Javascript programmers).
Currently in its fourth incarnation (which is why it is frequently referred to as PHP4), the language is also richly extensible, and comes with a set of optional libraries that can handle a range of tasks from Flash file manipulation to gif creation.
Finally, and perhaps just as importantly, PHP benefits from a close association with Open Source database manager Mysql. Mysql is a serious competitor with Microsoft's SQL server, in that it is capable of handling large scale database solutions with minimal performance degradation. It is also much, much cheaper. For database applications above a certain size - or for cross-platform development, we now recommend PHP/Mysql in combination.
To see PHP in action with a simple database example, use the Demo form below.
Example sites (Albedo):
The Web Review (PHP was hardly visible but, in fact, it formed the core of the site, being used to publish the static pages from a Mysql database).
PHP links:
PHP.net
Mysql.com
