Discover what the hype about PHP is all about.

PHP is an acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP was introduced back in 1995 and initially written as a set of CGI in ‘C’ so the PHP syntax is very similar to the C coding. Designed to fill the gaps between Server Side Includes and Perl. PHP has rapidly become of the most popular and fastest growing server-side language, powering millions of web sites and applications around the world. PHP is a free, extreme popular open-source server-side scripting language designed for creating robust and reliable dynamic web sites for e-commerce and other mission critical Web applications.

PHP has evolved rapidly to be a fully featured, ease-to-use programming language for productive dynamic website development and PHP can easily be embedded together with other web technologies as HTML. The growing enterprise adoption of PHP-based web applications is a result of PHP's three key advantages over competing technologies:

• Open Source
  Collaborative development leads to rapid technology advancement, superior code quality, a massive library of prewritten code, and comprehensive developer support and documentation.


• Designed for the Web
  PHP has built-in features to handle the load demand and to simplify common Web programming tasks.


• Ease of Use
  Companies gain enhanced productivity of development teams and significantly reduced time-to-market of mission critical web applications.

Examples of enterprises who exploits the business advantages of PHP are:

Cisco, WorldCom, NTT DoCoMo, CMG, Vodafone, Motorola, Siemens, Ericsson, CBS, Unilever, Philips, BMC, NTT, Air Canada, JAL, Lufthansa, Mitsubishi, OnVista, Lycos Europe, Deutsche Bank, NASA, W3C, Google, Yahoo!, Redhat, Lycos, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Sony Music, Bang & Olufsen and many many other enterprises!

Today PHP is installed on more than 20+ million websites worldwide and on more than 1+ million web servers worldwide and this trend is growing rapidly!

Learn more about PHP

The best place to learn more about PHP is at the official website for PHP at php.net.

Did you know phpDesigner 8 has integration with the official PHP manual. This allows you to learn and explore the world of PHP.