PHP

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language designed for web development. It is embedded in HTML and processed by a web server to generate dynamic pages. While its core use is server-side scripting, PHP can also be used from the command line for scripting tasks and to build simple applications.

History and development: PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 as a set of Common Gateway Interface scripts, originally called Personal Home Page Tools. It evolved into PHP/F and then PHP 3 under the PHP Group, becoming a widely adopted server-side language. PHP 5 introduced a more complete object model with the Zend Engine, followed by substantial performance and feature improvements in PHP 7 and PHP 8.

Engine and language features: PHP is dynamically typed with optional type declarations, namespaces, and modern programming constructs. It supports procedural, object-oriented, and some functional programming styles. The language is interpreted, with automatic memory management and a large standard library for tasks such as string handling, file I/O, and web interactions.

Usage and ecosystem: PHP is widely used in web development and in content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. It is commonly deployed on LAMP stacks (Linux, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP) and with other stacks such as Nginx. The ecosystem includes popular frameworks like Laravel and Symfony and tooling such as Composer for dependency management.

Licensing and availability: PHP is free and open source, released under the PHP License. It runs on major operating systems including Linux, Windows, and macOS, and supports web servers such as Apache, Nginx, and IIS.