What is PHP? The PHP Programming Language Meaning Explained

This can be a convenient way to perform these common tasks without having to directly use the lower-level engine classes. When you’ve got an application ready, it’s time to deploy it and make it accessible from anyone on the Web. PHP is a server-side language, and one of the handy things it provides is access to the filesystem. Forms are the way the Web platform allows users to interact with a page and send data to the server. Similarly, you can create a test.php file and automatically that will be the file that Apache serves on the /test route.

php web development

We suggest that you learn about Rest APIs, HTTP request methods (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE), Rest API creation, and CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete). Different status codes, data formats used in the request (JSON, HTML, or XML), and so on. Active learning techniques seem to be preferred over passive learning strategies by educational practitioners.

What comes after the Developer Sandbox?

At this point, it’s no surprise that the world’s largest content management system also uses PHP. One of the most popular PHP examples, which is currently the largest CMS. The entire WordPress infrastructure is based on PHP, and this language is used to quickly retrieve data from the database.

php web development

Fintech companies have their own mobile apps as well as websites where users perform transactions on dynamically typed pages. Here are a few fintech companies that use PHP for this purpose. Laravel allows their developers to code efficiently php web development and they also need to update tons of product lists and information about their medicines. They took the easy path, choosing Laravel as their primary language for their web framework, and they do have responsive and interactive web pages.

How Variables Work in PHP

The company manages advertising costs of €2.5 billion for hundreds of companies. Ratio is a British fintech company that offers its customers a simple and secure payment solution. Their core infrastructure revolves around a mobile payment app, but as far as the website is concerned, they use PHP as their primary language. On this e-commerce site, people sell art, collectibles, and a range of creative handcrafted goods. The site is built on PHP and uses HHVM to improve the performance of its web page. Magento helps online sellers in the commercial marketplace by creating a more engaging and more convenient shopping experience for users.

If you’ve used compiled languages like C or Go or Swift, the main difference is that you don’t need to compile a PHP program before you run it. Programming languages are divided into groups depending on their characteristics. For example interpreted/compiled, strongly/loosely typed, dynamically/statically typed. So if the last time you tried it was PHP 5 or even PHP 4, you’ll be surprised at all the good things that PHP now offers. It’s the language that powers WordPress, the widely used content management system for websites. Many developers find technical interviews to be the most challenging part of the interview process, but it helps to know that you don’t always have to have the right answer.

How to Build a Simple PHP Website

This includes MySQL, OOP, and how to launch your application online. These are all essential skills for any aspiring PHP developer. This PHP course is designed to help you master PHP by learning the essential skills and putting them into practice with a portfolio-worthy CMS project. There are a lot of choices, so take some time to read about these systems, how they function, and how to deploy or manage the code on them. Last but not least, as a software developer, you should be able to maintain, scale, migrate, and deploy your code on various platforms such as cloud, AWS, Heroku, Netlify, and others.

This is useful if, for example, you have multiple files loading some other file, and you typically want to avoid loading that more than once. Include loads the content of another PHP file, using a relative path. Other magic methods include __call(), __get(), __set(), __isset(), __toString() and others. Magic methods are special methods that we define in classes to perform some behavior when something special happens. It’s worth noting that while we can access the parent’s properties and methods from the child, we can’t do the reverse.

How to Use PHP as a Web App Development Platform

Below is an example of how PHP variables are declared and initialized. One of the main benefits of the match expression is that it allows you to specify multiple values for a single case, as shown in the example above. Thank you for reading through this introduction to the wonderful world of PHP development.

php web development

Plus, I like the fact that you can learn while also creating a marketable portfolio project to showcase to potential employers. Here at hackr.io, we’re really keen on the idea of learning by doing. After all, there really is no substitute for building something you can see and use. Perhaps the biggest highlight in this course is the emphasis on practical application by building a complete application with CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) functionalities. Perhaps the best feature of this course is the CRUD application you’ll be building. If you’re unfamiliar with educative, they’ve opted for a unique approach to teaching PHP by favoring interactive coding playgrounds and text lessons versus video.

How to Use the Constructor Method in PHP

PHP remains a relevant and widely-used language in web development. Despite the mockery and debate on whether it’s still valuable, PHP developers keep earning good livings from working with the language. Now you know how to develop a PHP website, you should know that it isn’t the only way to develop websites. Many frameworks exist already for dynamic, database-driven web experiences, there’s JavaScript and related technologies, and software like Adobe Dreamweaver. Before starting, be sure you have a plain text editor or PHP-ready development environment installed. You can start coding PHP with a tool as simple as Windows Notepad.

  • A lot of PHP developers make a good living making WordPress themes and plugins every year – the average PHP developer in the US makes $86,000 per year.
  • Their web platform uses PHP and Java as their two main programming languages.
  • Moreover, unlike many other programming languages, PHP has its own support.
  • No new features, unless small and self-contained, are to be introduced into a minor release during the three-year release process.
  • Whether you’re just starting out or an experienced dev who wants to boost your skills, we’ve included php courses for all levels, including free and paid options.
  • And you don’t even need to use a framework — especially if you’re creating a lightweight site and don’t need any of the features that a framework can add.

A detailed discussion of these general principles exists both on the Internet and in print,” says their report. This is most likely the largest music streaming app with millions of users. You can access millions of songs with a simple search and click.

Always be in the loop.

Most web hosting providers offer PHP, and when it comes to cost, PHP often comes out ahead in both development time and the overall cost to run and maintain. As an efficient language, PHP can deliver the high-performance times demanded by today’s consumers. By 1998, version 3 of PHP was released to the public, and the most recent release was version 8.1 in 2021. Today, PHP has everything you would expect in a modern programming language, including object-oriented features, a vast selection of third-party libraries, and cross-platform support. PHP is a loosely-typed language that uses eight data types to construct variables (which store data of different types).

How to Use Methods in PHP

The protection of a user’s account is highly reliant on authentication. As a result, it’s critical to understand how to work with this kind of feature in your PHP web development company. To follow in their footsteps, you’ll need to be inspired and, hopefully, able to learn PHP easily and efficiently. Lalit Singla is a distinguished Technical Architect renowned for his exceptional programming skills and logical prowess in solving complex technical and programming challenges. With an innate ability to dissect problems and find innovative solutions, he has earned a reputation as a go-to expert in the industry.

While you’ll need some knowledge of HTML to get started, PHP has become the optimum choice for building websites, both static and dynamic. Similar packages, WAMP and MAMP, are also available for Windows and macOS, with the first letter standing for the respective operating system. Although both PHP and Apache are provided as part of the macOS base install, users of these packages seek a simpler installation mechanism that can be more easily kept up to date. The visibility of PHP properties and methods is defined using the keywords public, private, and protected. The default is public, if only var is used; var is a synonym for public.