PHP Help for PHP Programmers @ PHPCatalyst

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What can I do with PHP?

PHP, as we told earlier, is a server side scripting language. The user will always see and interact with HTML in his browser. PHP is capable of generating dynamic HTML pages and hence it can output HTML which servers as a presentation layer and in the backend, on the server, it can continue to process all requests made by the client. These requests could be processing of a web form, handling cookies, uploading files, generating dynamic HTML by querying a database etc.

PHP can also be used from command line to execute php scripts. This is similar to running a UNIX shell or a perl script from command to accomplish tasks like taking backup of files, analyzing log files, generating a list of files and folders etc.

PHP is capable of doing much more than what we mentioned above. You can use it on command line interface to do most of the tasks stated above, without a browser, of course. PHP can also be used to create rich GUI applications using PHP-GTK kit. This requires knowledge of advanced PHP features.

Let's look at some of the popular features of PHP.