The World Wide Web allows us to do many amazing things, such as sharing information, photos and other things. We can also perform various functions such as online shopping and banking. The Internet can be both amazing and convenient. Many people want to have an involvement in various online activities, but they simply don’t know where to start. There are different web technologies that we can use to gain a foothold in the Internet. Once of the most important is PHP and it is the basis of many interactive websites, including many types of CMS. PHP is a good place to start if we want to learn web programming.
The main advantages of PHP are cost-effectiveness and ease of use. Virtually any web server supports PHP and we can put the code in a server, so the result will be displayed on users’ web browser. The PHP community is also large enough and we should gain more than enough supports from the existing community. There are competing technologies that we may also choose, such as ASP that’s supported by Microsoft. It also allows us to create highly detailed web applications. However, it also means that we need to use Windows operating system and various development tools from the company.
Building an ASP application with specific numbers of features could cost us hundreds of dollars. We may also need to purchase licenses. On the flipside, we will obtain good support from Microsoft itself. There are also other free alternatives that we can use, such as Ruby on Rails and Django. However, probably not all web servers support these languages, although they are still quite common. In addition, we may not get the same kind of support that we get from PHP. When learning to use PHP, we don’t need a huge technical book with plenty of confusing instructions. Getting started with PHP is actually quite easy. There are various pre-made PHP applications that we can download. We may de-construct them and add new things to it.
Many of these PHP applications are simple enough to understand for beginners and they could become templates for various functions. In fact, there are thousands of such codes that we can download and modify. Some large pre-made PHP applications are also available, such as CMS and forums. If we want to learn more about PHP, it is a good idea to avoid using the automatic installer. We could upload the files ourselves and they usually have enough helpful explanations. We should learn how to make the modifications that we want. Many PHP applications allow the use of plugins and mod scripts to allow us to add additional features.
We may also learn to write plugins and mod scripts to improve the capabilities of existing PHP platforms. When programming with PHP, we often don’t need worry about making the whole application. We could just focus on specific features. PHP is also often associated with two other web technologies, such as MySQL and Apache.
