Saturday, September 26, 2009

PHP/MySQL


By: California web design company, Tue Sep 15th, 2009
HTML is a fairly good technology for simple web design requirements. However, when the complexity of the project increases, the need for a more sophisticated web programming language or script becomes essential. Many advanced scripting languages have been developed over the years to fulfill this need. All of them have their own strengths and limitations. One of the most popular web scripting languages in use today is PHP. Rasmus Lerdorf a Danish/Greenlandic programmer was the original developer of PHP in 1995. The scripting language has been in continuous development ever since. Lerdorf initially named it as PHP referring to its use as a Personal Home Page builder. Two developers at the Technion IIT, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the PHP parser in the year 1997 which formed the base of PHP 3. They also changed PHP’s name to indicate the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. Currently PHP is developed by The PHP Group. Contrary to popular belief, PHP is not released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Although it is free software, it is released under the PHP License because of certain restrictions on the use of the term PHP. One of the main strengths of PHP (like all other web scripting languages) lies in its ability to make improved web design and to create dynamic web pages on the fly. For instance, to create a website to list the particulars of 100 employees in an organization, a traditional approach using plain HTML would require the creation of 100 separate static web pages. This would be extremely cumbersome especially if changes to a particular field such as the salary or the age of each employee need to be updated. A web scripting language like PHP on the other hand can be used to extremely simplify the whole process. All the employee details can be stored in a relational database such as MySQL or SQL Server and a single PHP script can fetch the data one record at a time and build pages on the fly. Any changes that are required need to be done only in that single script file which simplifies the entire web design process. This also ensures uniformity and helps reduce errors in the data. The combination of PHP and MySQL forms a powerful synergy that is effectively utilized by a number of companies for their web applications. In fact many of the most popular social websites such as Yahoo!, YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, WordPress, Joomla, Digg and Drupal have been developed using PHP. It has also been estimated that over 20 million websites were hosted on PHP servers as of April 2007. If you're located in Sacramento and in need of a Sacramento web design company be sure to visit us online. OR if you are near Roseville,CA be sure to checkout Roseville Web Design.

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