Wrox - Professional PHP Programming

What Is PHP?

The World Wide Web has changed very fast in so many ways. Sometimes it seems like yesterday that a little known markup language with a strange name HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) was used by some physicists to link scientific documents at a group of CERN servers. It was wondrous to read some text somewhere in the world with just a simple program, and what is more information in the document could magically transport you to another one with related information.

And this spread relatively quickly to other sciences. Text-only interfaces were the norm, and simplicity of accessing information content the most important part of the equation. Text documents with a small set of tags and a simple server setup was all you needed to inform your colleagues and share the knowledge, independently of whether the organic chemist at the other end was using his trusty Mac, or the theoretician was using her Unix box, or the impoverished graduate was using a second or third hand PC running very flaky TCP/IP software.

Nowadays we expect more, much more than this. We expect a web site with lots of information, and a good presentation, but we do not want to be distracted by a difficult interface. The information should be easy to find, and it should be current. A clean and dynamic web site is a great asset for the user and for the information provider. Long gone (fortunately) are the days of garish-looking web sites with blinky thingies, lots of animated images that usually were hiding a shallow content depth. We want information, we want it 5 minutes ago and we want it in the way we like it.

A modern web site is not just a web server; it also includes a way of storing data and querying (a SQL database perhaps), a way of processing the requests from the user and creating documents with the appropriate information. Many are the options open to the web developer, but not all of them as open and general as others. We should not only consider the immediate task at hand of creating a site with dynamic content, we need to be sure that we can still be providing the said content independently of the changes in hardware or software technology.