PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is a general-purpose programming language is mainly focuses on server-side scripting, you can do whatever another CGI program can do, such as generating dynamic page content, gathering form data, or sending and receiving cookies. But PHP can do much more.

Three main areas where PHP scripts are used.

Server-side script. 

This is the most traditional and most important target field for PHP. You need three things to make this work: PHP parser (CGI or server module), a web server, and a web browser. You must run the webserver with a connected PHP installation. You can access the PHP program output with a web browser and view the PHP page through the server. All these can keep running on your home machine if you just experiment with PHP programming. See the installation instructions section for more information

Command line scripting. 

You can create a PHP script to run it without any server or browser. You just need the PHP parser to use it this way. This type of use is ideal for scripts that are executed regularly using Cron (on * nix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows). These scripts can also be used for simple word processing tasks. See the PHP command line section for more information.

Writing desktop applications.

 PHP is probably not the best language for building desktop applications with a graphical user interface, but if you know PHP very well and want to use some advanced PHP features in your client-side applications, you can write to Such programs with the use of PHP-GTK. This way You also have the capability to write cross-platform applications. PHP-GTK is an extension for PHP, not available in the main division.

PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, several Unix versions,, macOS, RISC OS, Microsoft Windows, and perhaps others. PHP also supports most web servers today. This includes Apache, IIS and many others. And this includes any web server that can use the FastCGI PHP binary, such as Lighttpd and Nginx. PHP works either as a CGI processor or as a module.

So with PHP, you have the opportunity of picking an operating system and a web server. Furthermore, you additionally have the decision of using procedural programming or object-oriented programming (OOP), or a mixture of them both. you are not limited to output HTML, With PHP. PHP's capabilities include the output of images, PDFs and even Flash movies generated along the way. You can also easily output any text, such as XHTML and any other XML file. PHP can automatically generate these files and save them to the file system instead of printing them and creating a server-side cache for your dynamic content

One of the strongest and most significant features in PHP  is its help for a wide scope of databases. It is incredibly simple to write a database-enabled web page using one of the database-specific extensions (for example, to mysql), or use an abstraction layer such as PDO, or connect to any database that supports the Open Database Connection standard via ODBC extension. Other databases may use CURL or sockets, such as CouchDB

PHP additionally has support for conversing with other services using protocols such as LDAP, POP3, IMAP, NNTP, SNMP, HTTP, COM (on Windows) and numerous others. You can also open raw network connectors and interact using any other protocol. PHP has an endorsement for WDDX complex data swap between almost all web programming languages.

When we talk about interconnection, PHP has support for instantiating Java objects and using them transparently as PHP objects

PHP has useful text processing features that include PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) and several extensions and tools for parsing and accessing XML documents. PHP standardizes all XML extensions on the libxml2 fixed base and extends the feature set, adding XMLReader , SimpleXML, and XMLWriter support

And there are many other interesting extensions that are categorized both alphabetically and by category. And there are additional PECL extensions that may or may not be documented in the PHP manual itself, like XDebug.

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