PHP

In web development, PHP is a general-purpose programming language that is mostly used for web development. Rasmus Lerdorf, a Danish-Canadian programmer, was the original creator of the game in 1994. The PHP Group is now responsible for the development of the PHP reference implementation. PHP was initially abbreviated as Personal Home Page, but it is now abbreviated as the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, which stands for Hypertext Preprocessor.

On a web server, PHP code is often interpreted by a PHP interpreter, which may be implemented as a module, a daemon, or as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executable executable. In a Http server, the output of the interpreted and executed PHP code – which might be any kind of data, such as HTML or binary image data – would be the whole or a portion of the answer sent by the web server to the client. In order to orchestrate or simplify the production of that answer on the internet, several online template systems, web content management systems, and web frameworks are available to be used. Additionally, PHP may be used for a wide variety of programming activities outside of the online environment, such as standalone graphical programmes and robotic drone control, among other things. PHP code may also be run straight from the command line, if necessary.

The PHP interpreter, which is powered by the Zend Engine, is free software distributed under the terms of the PHP License. PHP has been extensively ported and can be used on the majority of web servers running on a broad range of operating systems and platform configurations.

Until 2014, there was no documented official definition or standard for the PHP programming language, with the original implementation serving as a de facto standard that subsequent implementations attempted to emulate. Since 2014, efforts have been made to formalise the PHP programming language definition.

In April 2021, W3Techs states that "PHP is utilised by 79.2 percent of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know," which is a significant number.