Dynamic web development with PHP

PHP is the most popular scripting language for developing a dynamic website. A dynamic website is one whose page content may vary according to the various variables read by the server. Examples of such variables are,

  1. Submitted form data from the client computer;
  2. Visitors IP address;
  3. Current date and time;
  4. Cookie saved in client machine;
  5. User session stored in server, etc.

Consider the case of a bulletin board website; until a user logged in he or she will access limited features and contents which is allocated to a guest visitor. But whenever logged in with his unique user name and password the same URL will provide him few more information which is user specific. Those information may be a welcome message, personal message (PM) arrived at his inbox, when last visited, link to submit a new story, etc. In this example we see that the content of a webpage is varying according to the user browsing the website. So this is an example of dynamic website.

Role of PHP in web development

Web pages developed by HTML script are said as static WebPages. You can't vary the page content by using HTML script. This script only can format your webpage content, i.e. making bold text, create tabulated data, etc. Although you can use JavaScript to produce dynamic effect but there are several limitations.

  1. JavaScript source code can be read from the client machine; so client can easily understand what ultimate job the script is doing.
  2. JavaScript can't give database support;

So use of JavaScript is mainly limited in decorating WebPages or to alarm users with an event. But a full function dynamic website should handle form data submitted by the users, handle cookie, access remote database, handle file upload, etc. PHP is a server side language which can do all those jobs very successfully and accordingly it generates necessary HTML code which then reaches to the client computer. In this way the static HTML script itself varies according to the data processed by the PHP server there by producing a dynamic effect at the client computer.

Advantages of PHP

Although there are several other languages like, ASP, JSP, .NET, Ruby on Rails, etc. which can successfully built a dynamic website but PHP has several advantages for which it is the most popular choice among the web developers in building a dynamic website. These advantages are,

  1. PHP can be embedded into HTML code;
  2. Learning PHP is rather simple than other languages;
  3. It has a very rich inbuilt set of functions which can handle almost every operation required for developing a successful website.
  4. PHP has a rich function set to access remote database.
  5. There are many free tools and resources in PHP available in the internet today.
  6. PHP is an open source free language.
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