PHP has been around for a few years now and has developed as a language. Why should you use it over ASP, JSP, or Perl when you are building a web application? With a veritable alphabet of programming languages to choose from when you decide to write a web based application, why should you choose PHP over ASP, JSP, Perl, CGI, or Cold synthesis? While any decision you make also has to be based on the business supplies of the application, as a consultant you often have the choice of what language to use. So barring an IT department that tells you “It’s Microsoft or nothing!” or a gaggle of UNIX developers demanding that all their applications be Java based, here are a few reasons why PHP is the best solution for web applications. It was created for the web – PHP started as a collection of C applications that the author wrote for use on his own web site. It evolved into a server-side scripting language built for building logic into web pages. This firmness in design has resulted in a language that is both flexible and streamlined for use on the web. Its cross-platform – PHP runs on UNIX, Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. In addition to being cross-platform, it has built in functions for connecting to most popular database, including general ODBC connections. It’s cross-language – What does that mean? It’s a term I coined to show that PHP can use objects in languages other than PHP. It can call Windows COM objects and Java objects, making it easier to separate the business logic from the user interface. The PHP team is even working on letting it call .NET meeting. The syntax is based on C – Being based on C makes it easier for Java, C, even JavaScript programmers to pick up. It also has built in functions for handling regular expressions, XML parsing, and cryptography. You can compile in different libraries that allow you to manipulate graphics. One feature of the language where it breaks from the C syntax is it’s object-oriented nature. It supports the creation of custom classes and allowing other classes to inherit from your custom classes. Future releases should further enhance it’s object-oriented capabilities. PHP is much faster than CGI – It’s not as fast as JSP’s, which are compiled, but it is faster and uses less system resources than CGI programs do. My final reason for choosing PHP over other languages has to do with the popularity of the languages. Thousands of web pages are running PHP and it has a dedicated following. If you choose to learn PHP, you can be assured that you can find enough resources to answer any question you have and in most cases you’ll find that someone has already written code that does exactly what you need and is giving it away for free.

Each of these technologies have their strengths and weakness but overall for beginners getting into the game of dynamic websites There are some reason to choose this language

1. It is so popular that cheap PHP hosting is not hard to find.
2. It is free.
3 It is easy to learn
4. It is flexible and powerful.
5. PHP is probably the most popular web scripting language and environment out today so there is a lot of freely available information out there on it.