What projects can php be used for?

PHP focuses primarily on server-side scripting, so you can do everything that other CGI programs can do, such as data collection, generating dynamic page content, or sending and receiving cookies. But PHP can do much more.

Three main areas for using PHP scripts.

Server-side script. This is the traditional and primary target area of ​​PHP. You need three things to make this work. PHP parser (CGI or server module), a web server and a web browser. You need to run the web server with a connected PHP installation. You can use a web browser to access PHP program output and view PHP pages through the server. All of this can be run on your local machine, if you are just experienced with PHP programming. Please refer to the Installation Instructions section for more information.
Command line script. You can run PHP scripts without any server or browser. You just need a PHP parser for this approach. This is ideal for regular script extensions using cron (in Unix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (in Windows). These scripts can also be used for simple word processing tasks. For more information, please refer to: [PHP Command Line Usage].
Write desktop applications. PHP is probably not the best programming language for creating desktop applications with graphical user interfaces, but if you know PHP well and are willing to use some advanced PHP features in your client applications, you can also use PHP-GTK Write a program like this. You also have the ability to write cross-platform applications this way. PHP-GTK is a PHP extension and is not included in the main distribution. If you are interested in PHP-GTK, you can visit its own website.
PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, many different Unixes (including HP-UX, Solaris, and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS, and more. PHP now also supports most web servers. This includes Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Personal Web Server, Netscape and iPlanet Server, Oreilly Websita Pro Server, Caudium, Xitami, OmniHTTPd and many more. Mainstream servers provide PHP services as a module, while others support the CGI standard and PHP can work as a CGI processor.

By using PHP, you will have the freedom of choice of operating system and web server. In addition, you can also choose to use procedural programming or object-oriented programming, or a hybrid of them. Although not every standard OOP feature is implemented in PHP 4, most code bases and large applications (including the PEAR library) are written using OOP code. PHP 5 addresses the OOP-related weaknesses in PHP 4 and introduces a complete object model.

With PHP you are not limited to outputting HTML. PHP's capabilities include outputting images, PDF files, and even flash-generated Flash movies (using libswf and Ming). You can also output any simple text such as XHTML and any other XML file. PHP can automatically generate these files and save them on the file system instead of printing them, forming a server-side cache for your dynamic content.

One of the most powerful and important features of PHP is its extensive database support. Writing database-enabled Web pages is so easy. The following list is the currently supported database:

Adabas D
dBase
Empress
FilePro (read-only)
Hyperwave
IBM DB2
Informix
Ingres
InterBase
FrontBase
mSQL
Direct MS-SQL
MySQL
ODBC
Oracle (OCI7 and OCI8)
Ovrimos
PostgreSQL
SQLite
Solid
Sybase
Velocis
Unix dbm
We also have a database abstraction extension (named PDO) that allows you to transparently use any supported database through this extension. In addition, PHP also supports ODBC (Open Database Connection standard), so you can connect to any other database that supports this world-class standard.

PHP also supports conversations with other services using LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP, COM (in Windows). You can also open a raw network socket and interact with it using any other protocol. PHP also supports complex WDDX data interaction between visualizations in all web programming languages. In conjunction with interactive connections, PHP also supports instantiation of Java objects and transparently uses them as PHP objects. You can also use our CORBA extension to access remote objects.

PHP has very useful word processing features, using POSIX Extended or Perl regular expressions to parse XML files. For parsing and accessing XML documents, PHP 4 also supports SAX and DOM standards, and you can also use the SXLT extension to transform XML documents. PHP 5 standardizes all XML extensions to the libxml2 entity base and extends the feature set to add SimpleXML and XMLReader support.

Last, but not least, we have many other interesting extensions, mnoGoSearch search engine functionality, IRC Gateway functionality, many compression utilities (gzip, bz2, zip), calendar conversion, translation...

The same non-exhaustive list of features and benefits provided by PHP that you see on this page. Read the installation section about PHP, and see the feature reference section for the various extensions mentioned.

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