file extension PHP

File extension PHP description:

Formerly referred to as “Personal Home Page Tools,” PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is an open source server side scripting language. It is very popular for developing web based software applications because programmers can use it easily to create web pages with dynamic content that interact with databases.

PHP is currently the most common of the server-side scripting languages. It's an open-source project designed specifically for quick development of dynamic web pages, and can run either as an Apache module, or as a CGI on less friendly web servers. The PHP scripting language is loosely typed and has a gigantic built-in function set, and a syntax somewhere between Perl and C++. PHP 4 (the current version) may not be the best platform for huge code bases because of its lack of exception-handling routines and object-oriented functionality, but it can't be beat for spitting out lightweight projects in 5 minutes. Plus, just about every web host everywhere supports PHP, which means you can switch whenever you find a cheaper plan.

.php pages are interpreted as static HTML pages until the web server hits a tag. This lets you easily embed small snippets of PHP wherever you need them in a static page, or embed large snippets of static HTML wherever you need them in a PHP script, both of which come in handy.

Because PHP lacks exception-handling routines, and because commercial web-hosts won't let customers change their PHP configuration file, you can see a lot of PHP error messages on PHP pages, automatically formatted to show up in bold text. This is especially true of database-driven sites, which will spit out these messages whenever the database goes down, if they don't have their configuration file set to log them instead of displaying them.