PHP is a general-purpose language that can be embedded in HTML. Much of its syntax is lifted from the C, Java and Perl languages, but it’s definitely its own beast, with many features exclusive to PHP in evidence. The whole point of making it was to cut down on the coding of dynamically generated pages for web developers. PHP code is parsed by a server that has a PHP script processor module, and it’s this that produces the website. The fact that PHP can be integrated also means that it can be worked on using the command-line interface or deployed in stand-alone graphics applications. PHP script is happy to run on the majority of modern servers and it’s free to use as a separate shell on commonly used OSs and platforms.
As we said, the focus for making PHP script was to create a tool for building dynamic websites, but these days it’s most often put to use on server-side scripting, so in that sense it’s like many other server-side scripting languages that offer up dynamic content from a remote server to a client, such as Microsoft’s ASP.NET, Sun Microsystems’ JavaServer Pages, and mod_perl.
Many frameworks have been based on PHP script to give programmers the raw materials and design pathway needed for rapid application development (RAD). Examples include CakePHP, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Yii Framework, and Zend Framework.