PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. It is a server side scripting language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. It has evolved to include a command line interface capability and can be used in standalone applications
PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML It is not the only server side programming language. Others are Microsoft ASP, Adobe Coldfusion, and JSP. The main reason for PHP's popularity is distributed freely under the GNU license while other technologies are proprietary. PHP also interfaces nicely with the MySQL database. You can check out the status, manuals and tutorials at www.php.net