PHP Article

Introduction

PHP is a popular general-purpose server-side scripting language that is especially suited to web development. It is fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (The First P is an recursive acronym for PHP). It was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, the latest version of PHP is PHP7(.x.x).

Features

PHP can be object orientated and is open-source (and therefore free to download). It can be used to develop dynamic page web applications.

PHP is very simple and easy to use compared to other scripting languages (such as ASP) and thus it is widely used around the world. It is also one of the fastest scripting languages compared to ASP and JSP (Java Server Pages).

It can run on every platform this is very good for making cross-browser applications.

Pros/Cons

PHP has its pros and cons:

Pros	Cons
Low barrier of entry - Getting up and running with PHP is pretty easy. You can integrate it with the front end (HTML,JS,CSS)	Interpreter Language - Like Python and Ruby, it's an interpreted language that is compiled down to Opcode. This can be overcome to some extent with Opcode caching but warmup can be problematic.
Supports both Functional and Object Oriented Programming, Lambdas, and anonymous functions.	Threaded Execution - Finite amounts of memory means that threading is limited to the amount of memory a user has.
There is a huge amount of support for PHP online, such as online communities and website bloggers such as WordPress and Magneto, as well as other CMSes (Content Management Systems).	Language Perception - Due to the low barrier of entry and the popular legacy code bases like WordPress, having a company consistig of Java / Node.js developers is more financially viable than having a company of PHP developers.
Ease of debugging problems. PHP has first class debugging including remote debugging that is becoming more and more important with the emerging virtual machine world of Docker and Vagrant in the Developer's workstation.	Global Extensions - PHP requires extensions, bridges between C code and PHP to be installed globally to the PHP executable. They require modifying the global configuration file to be accessible.

Extra Programs

ASP, JSP (Alternatives)
Object Oriented Programming Practices
Notepad++, Apache etc (Programs to write PHP on)
HTML, CSS, JS (For Front End)
SQL programs such as mySQL and Oracle SQL (backend)

Summary

In conclusion:

PHP is a great language to learn for the interacting end of any web techology. It can be used to do a lot to create nice websites, however there are much better and more versatile technologies out there such as Node.js and ASP (c#) which are more widely used. PHP developers arent really needed as much as Node.js / c# developers, but PHP is still a decent language to learn and to develop websites with.