PHP or Hypertext Preprocessor is a scripting language, which is used especially for web development.

PHP is mainly a server side scripting and can easily be embedded into HTML. Its functionalities resemble with any other CGI programs’ functionalities like collecting form data, generating page content, sending or receiving cookies etc.

PHP dominates in three major sectors like:
· Server Side Scripting - the main field for PHP, where three things are required – PHP parser, web server and a web browser
· Command Line Scripting - for making PHP script run without any server or browser. Only PHP parser is required for this purpose.
· Desktop Application – advanced PHP features with PHP-GTK extension allow to write such applications.

PHP provides the freedom of choosing operating systems and web server since it is compatible with most of the OS and web servers. PHP works well with all major operating systems such as Linux, Unix variants, Microsoft Windows, Mac etc. PHP also supports most of the web servers like Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Netscape and iPlanet server etc.

Additionally, PHP offers a choice of using procedural or object-oriented programming language or a combination of two. Apart from providing only HTML outputs, PHP provides images, PDF files and even flash movies. XML files are also automatically generated by PHP.

The most significant feature of PHP is its ability to support a wide range of databases. PHP supports almost all the databases and ODBC, the Open Database Connection standard.