From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Originally, PHP stood for "Personal Home Page". Today, the official meaning is the recursive acronym "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". Some fans of this language also use the label "Pretty Hypertext Preprocessor". And the people who use this language professionally like to call it "Professional Hypertext Preprocessor", which sounds more business oriented than Pretty and easier to explain to customers than explaining recursive definition.

Examples of PHP applications include phpBB as well as MediaWiki. The PHP model can be seen as an alternative to Microsoft's ASP.NET/C#/VB.NET system, Macromedia's ColdFusion system, Sun Microsystems' JSP/Java system, the Zope/Python system, and to the Mod perl/Perl system.

PHP allows interaction with a large number of relational database management systems, such as MySQL, Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL and SQLite. PHP runs on most major operating systems, including UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, and can interact with many major web servers. The official PHP website contains extensive documentation. The Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) architecture has become popular in the Web industry as a way of deploying inexpensive, reliable, scalable, secure web applications. (The 'P' in LAMP can also stand for Perl or Python.) Alternatively, the Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP (WIMP) and Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP (WAMP) architectures exist as alternatives for those wishing to use Windows as their server operating system.

PHP is dynamically typed. That is, the rules are not as strict with variables—they do not have to be declared and they can hold any type of object. Arrays are heterogenous, meaning a single array can contain objects of more than one type. There is a command line interface , as well as GUI libraries such as GTK+ and text mode libraries like Ncurses and Newt.

PHP is the result of the efforts of many contributors. It is licensed under a BSD-style license, the PHP license. Since version 4, it has been powered by the Zend engine.