 So, in this module students, we will talk about what is PHP and why use PHP because PHP is the rapid application development tool or the environment which we will be using and are using in this course and there will be multiple modules which will cover actually looking at the code the PHP code which will be used in this course. So, PHP is very popular. We will of course discuss why PHP is very popular but as per the figures of year 2013 there were more than 200 million PHP servers on the internet. As of today of course I believe that number would have been multiplied a number of times and it is very popular web programming language in addition to the standard languages. So, PHP has a powerful background and it has a powerful history and of course the future also and you will be surprised to know that Facebook was built using PHP and still uses PHP part of it. So, this is the module coverage for this current module that what is PHP, what tasks can be carried out by PHP, common examples of PHP and of course I will be comparing PHP with other common programming technologies, web programming technologies. In this module I will compare it with some of them like we will compare with ASP, ASP.NET, compare with Java, compare with cold fusion, compare with Ruby, compare with Python and Perl and of course that comparison will not be a detailed comparison because that is beyond the scope of this course but it will give you a fair amount of idea that where does PHP stands. So, what is PHP? PHP is a programming language for creating dynamic sites, interactive sites because as we have discussed in detail in the previous modules that if the sites are not dynamic then you cannot then it doesn't make any sense accessing the database how many things you can have statically over there and without interactivity it is difficult to engage the user. So, what is PHP is a hypertext processor for information and produce hypertext HTML. So, what PHP does? PHP generates dynamic web page, you can embed PHP in static pages and of course the static content remains the same like the name of the company, like the location of the page itself in the hierarchy and so on but the other contents can be generated and are generated dynamically. It is a server side scripting language, it does not runs on the client end, it is a scripting language which runs at the server okay at the server side and PHP engine is interpreted language every time it comes across the language it runs it okay so the difference between some of the standard languages understand. So, how do we go about doing all those things? What can PHP do? Web form processing Tasked out by PHP web form processing I have a web form and I fill in the data to register a user I fill in the data to send my feedback to the user to the company and I have a web form using which I am exchanging certain stuff so web form processing is for the task for which PHP was made reading and creating files at the web server end working with database at the server end right doing these things at the server and not at the client end remember PHP is a server side programming language collecting and processing data from other websites and feeds so I can it's kind of a mashup I can get data and feeds from multiple websites and I can work on them and I can combine them to generate something which is a amalgamation or a combination mashup of all those feed generate dynamic graphics it is like for example there are certain polls you you generate a poll and is a survey and people enter an answer give their feedback and based upon that feedback graphs are generated now of course you can say that there are certain organizations that there are certain portals which are providing such services of generating the graphs by default but what the point is that PHP maybe they are using PHP maybe they're using PHP or you can generate your customized graphs with customized formats with customized design using PHP that customization may not be offered by other organizations and common examples of PHP web forums message posting one of the biggest common forum which I have just mentioned to you is Facebook where you can post messages you can post pictures also so Facebook is built using PHP search engines powerful things online surveys and polls I've already mentioned content management systems blogs okay you enter the blogs enter your feedback in a blog and perform a search on that blog and generate the graphs also web mail applications sending mails composing mails reading mails so a common example of PHP online stores for you for e-commerce online stores for e-commerce that is done using PHP so why use PHP many ISPs and web hosting companies support PHP okay so there is a large group of companies okay you don't have to search almost it is in many many cases what I have seen is PHP hosting is like default every web service provider is providing PHP hosting and as a result there are large installations and there are large user base so this is more important for us user base so if I have problems if I have issues I have challenges if I need help because of this user base I can post a question and get my questions answered it is cross cross platform runs on windows linux and you see a host host of operating systems which support PHP so that is one thing which contributes to the popularity of PHP and can integrate with different servers Apache server internet information server etc so that is the the the variability in the platform in terms of the PHP now I will do a brief comparison of PHP with other web technologies and programming languages ASP ASP has been around for a long time although in the next module I will talk about the history of PHP but ASP ASP application integration has been around for 1997 and the script was usually vb style it may lack a certain kind of a structured framework but asp.net framework of libraries is there framework of libraries is there can use cshavvb.net java so you can develop using these programming languages and it has a quick production cycle asp.net so that's about in this module in the next module I will compare PHP with other programming languages and web technologies thank you for your time