PHP- THE BEST WEB DEVELOPMENT LANGUAGE AND ITS USES IN 2020.

WHAT IS PHP?

PHP stands for PERSONAL HOME PAGE but now it stands for the recursive backronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
PHP is an acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" PHP is a widely-used, open-source scripting language. PHP scripts are executed on the server.
It is considered a backend scripting language. PHP scripts are usually written on a server that the front-end or client-side code would interact with.

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994; the PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. However, the appearance of PHP in the market was in 1995.
PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter implemented as a module, a daemon, or as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executable. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code – which may be any type of data, such as generated HTML or binary image data – would form the whole or part of an HTTP response. 
The standard PHP interpreter, powered by the Zend Engine, is free software released under the PHP License.

The ADVENT OF PHP

Several Common Gateway Interface(CGI) programs in C language were written by RASMUS LERDORF which he used to maintain his personal homepage. This began the development of PHP in 1994.
He extended them to work with web forms and to communicate with databases and called this implementation "Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter" or PHP/FI.

To accelerate bug reporting and improve the code, Lerdorf initially announced the release of PHP/FI as "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0" on the Usenet discussion group comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi on June 8, 1995. This release already had the basic functionality that PHP has today. Early PHP was not intended to be a new programming language, and grew organically, with Lerdorf noting in retrospect: "I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way."
After this, there were several changes and improvements in this language by different people and gave PHP new names like:
PHP 3 and 4- By ZeevSuraski and Andi Gautam in 1997.
PHP 5- By New Zend Engine || in 2004.
PHP 6 and Unicode- Andrei Zmievski(A Group project Head) in 2005.
And the list goes on.

SYNTAX

The following "Hello, World!" program is written in PHP code embedded in an HTML document like:

However, as no requirement exists for PHP code to be embedded in HTML, the simplest version of Hello, World! may be written like this, with the closing tag omitted as preferred in files containing pure PHP code.

WHY USE PHP?

There are several programming languages built-in the computer world but then do you wonder why we want to use PHP as a poison for web programming? Below mentioned are some compelling reasons:
• PHP is open source and free.
• Large community documents.
• PHP is regularly updated to abreast with the latest technology trends.
• It is a server-side scripting language, meaning, you need to only install it on server and client computers requesting for resources from the server do not need to have PHP installed, only a web browser will be sufficient.
• PHP is cross-platform, meaning you can deploy your application on a number of different operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS, etc.

USES OF PHP

• It is used to create a dynamic website.
• To Interacting with the webserver (Apache etc).
• To interacting with any back-end/database server e.g. MySQL.
• To interact with the native file system of the OS.
• To implement the business logical layers (one or more).
• It can Encrypt Data.
• Access Cookies variable and set cookies.
• Using PHP you can restrict users to access a specific web page.
• PHP usually used to output HTML code to the browser.
• Used to connect web applications with DataBase.

USES OF PHP IN 2020

The use of PHP in 2020 has been increased rapidly due to pandemic and everything has come down to online platforms. Below mentioned are some points regarding it:

• You can have cybersecurity on your website.
• You can write your own script code.
• Image processing and Generations.
• You can create Instagram like filters for Images.
• You can create a content management system.
• You can create AMP.
• You can use Linux or Apache for free.
• Faster and effective E-commerce development.
• You can use the Ming library.

You can use PHP the way you like. It is one of the easiest languages to learn. Yet, it is and has always been one of the highest used languages.
In terms of market share, there are over 20 million websites and applications on the internet developed using PHP scripting language.