What else can be developed with PHP?

What else can be developed with PHP?

PHP can be used in three areas: server-side scripting, command line scripting and writing desktop applications. It is mainly used for server-side scripting programs. PHP can also be used to complete any other CGI program. Work that can be completed, such as collecting form data, generating dynamic web pages, etc.

PHP application

PHP can be used on all mainstream operating systems, including various variants of Linux and Unix (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS, etc. Today, PHP already supports most web servers, including Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Personal Web Server (PWS), Netscape, iPlant server, Oreilly Website Pro Server, Caudium, Xitami, OmniHTTPd, etc. For most servers, PHP provides a module; some PHP supports the CGI standard, allowing PHP to work as a CGI processor.

To sum up, using PHP, you can freely choose the operating system and web server. At the same time, you can also choose to use process-oriented, object-oriented, or a mixture of the two during development. Although PHP 4 does not support all OOP standards, many code repositories and large applications (including the PEAR library) are developed using only OOP code. PHP 5 makes up for this weakness of PHP 4 and introduces a complete object model.

Using PHP is not limited to outputting HTML. PHP can also be used to dynamically output images, PDF files and even Flash animations (using libswf and Ming). It is also possible to easily output text such as XHTML and any other form of XML file. PHP can automatically generate these files, open up a cache of dynamic content on the server, and print them out directly, or store them in the file system.

One of the most powerful and notable features of PHP is its support for a wide range of databases. It is very simple to write database-backed web pages using any extension for a certain database (such as mysql), or use an abstraction layer such as PDO, or connect to any database that supports the ODBC standard through the ODBC extension. Some other databases may also use cURL or sockets, such as CouchDB.

PHP also supports services utilizing protocols such as LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP, COM (Windows environment) and countless others. Raw network ports can also be opened so that any other protocol can work together. PHP supports WDDX complex data exchange between all web development languages. Regarding inter-connections, PHP already supports on-the-fly connections to Java objects and can transparently use them as PHP objects.

PHP has extremely efficient text processing features, including Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) and many extensions and tools for parsing and accessing XML documents. PHP standardizes all XML functionality into the solid libxml2 extension, and also adds SimpleXML, XMLReader and XMLWriter support to expand its functionality.

Recommended tutorial: "PHP Tutorial"

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