PHP

Posted on Apr 3, 2010

PHP stands for: Hypertext Preprocessor.

• PHP is a server-side scripting language, like ASP
• PHP scripts are executed on the server
• PHP supports many databases (MySQL, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Solid, PostgreSQL, Generic ODBC, etc.)
• It is free and open source.

Here are some of the things we have been doing with PHP:

• Email Forms
• Includes – Assume that you have a standard header file, called “header.php”. To include the header file in a page, use the include() function
• MySQL Database implementation
• Cookies and Cookie detection – used for displays and password protection.

I was having trouble working with dates in PHP. Specifically, I wanted to be able to find out programatically what is today’s date – which is easy, tomorrow’s date, next week, a week from tomorrow, etc. In case you find this useful, it’s at w3schools.com/php/php_date.asp