Programming Language WebQuest

PHP PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

Submitted to: Eddie Bouy Palad, IT Department, SCS, MSU-IIT

Submitted by: Zachary Albia Elrey Lorea Michelle Cepada, BS IT 3

Programming Language WebQuest

HISTORY
PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page. It began in 1994 as a set of Common Gateway Interface binaries written in the C programming language by the Danish/Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf. He initially created these Personal Home Page Tools to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage. He combined these binaries with his Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI (Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter), which had more functionality. PHP/FI included a larger implementation for the C programming language and could communicate with databases, enabling the building of simple, dynamic web applications. He released PHP publicly on June 8, 1995 to accelerate bug location and improve the code. This release was named PHP version 2 and already had the basic functionality that PHP has today. This included Perl-like variables, form handling, and the ability to embed HTML. The syntax was similar to Perl but was more limited, simpler, and less consistent. PHP 3.0 was the first version that closely resembles PHP as we know it today. It was created by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski in 1997 as a complete rewrite, after they found PHP/FI 2.0 severely underpowered for developing an eCommerce application they were working on for a University project. In an effort to cooperate and start building upon PHP/FI's existing user-base, Andi, Rasmus and Zeev decided to cooperate and announce PHP 3.0 as the official successor of PHP/FI 2.0, and development of PHP/FI 2.0 was mostly halted. They rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. By the winter of 1998, shortly after PHP 3.0 was officially released, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski had begun working on a rewrite of PHP's core. The design goals were to improve performance of complex applications, and improve the modularity of PHP's code base. Such applications were made possible by PHP 3.0's new features and support for a wide variety of third party databases and APIs, but PHP 3.0 was not designed to handle such complex applications efficiently. The new engine, dubbed 'Zend Engine' (comprised of their first names, Zeev and Andi), met these design goals successfully, and was first introduced in mid 1999. PHP 4.0, based on this engine, and coupled with a wide range of additional new

Programming Language WebQuest features, was officially released in May 2000, almost two years after its predecessor, PHP 3.0. In addition to the highly improved performance of this version, PHP 4.0 included other key features such as support for many more Web servers, HTTP sessions, output buffering, more secure ways of handling user input and several new languages constructs. Late static binding has been missing from PHP and will be added in version 5.3.On July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by the new Zend Engine II. PHP 5 included new features such as improved support for object-oriented programming, the PHP Data Objects extension (which defines a lightweight and consistent interface for accessing databases), and numerous performance enhancements. In 2008, PHP 5 became the only stable version under development.

Programming Language WebQuest

GENEALOGY

Programming Language WebQuest

TECHNICAL DETAILS
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development. PHP generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output. It can also be used for command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications. PHP can be deployed on most web servers, many operating systems and platforms, and can be used with many relational database management systems. It is available free of charge, and the PHP Group provides the complete source code for users to build, customize and extend for their own use. PHP primarily acts as a filter, taking input from a file or stream containing text and/or PHP instructions and outputs another stream of data; most commonly the output will be HTML. (PHP 4) the PHP parser compiles input to produce bytecode for processing by the Zend Engine, giving improved performance over its interpreter predecessor. Originally designed to create dynamic web pages, PHP's principal focus is server-side scripting, and it is similar to other server-side scripting languages that provide dynamic content from a web server to a client. PHP has also attracted the development of many frameworks that provide building blocks and a design structure to promote rapid application development (RAD). PHP as a language is imperative and object-oriented (as of PHP 4.0). PHPs typing discipline is dynamic and weak, i.e., a variables type can easily be changed throughout runtime and a variable can be used without first being declared. As shown in the genealogy, the language design of PHP is influenced by C-based and Perl-based languages. PHP is dynamically typed. That is, the rules are not as strict with variablesthey do not have to be declared and they can hold any type of object. Variables are case sensitive and their names are preceded by a dollar sign ($). The variable name is case-sensitive. Variables names cannot start with a number. Arrays are heterogeneous, meaning a single array can contain objects of more than one type. Variables are evaluated inside double quotation marks ("), but not inside single quotation marks ('). Functions and

Programming Language WebQuest other expressions are not evaluated inside double quotes but can be added to strings using periods for concatenation. A period (.) concatenates strings together. Boolean variables have two possible values True and False, another form of boolean would be replacing true and false with 1 and 0 (respectively) but is not a standard of coding. Integers are number variables. They are whole numbers that can be positive, negative, octal, and hexadecimal. PHP 5 introduces private and protected member variables; they allow you to define the visibility of class properties. Private and protected methods are also introduced. PHP 5 also introduces abstract classes and abstract methods. An abstract method only declares the method's signature and does not provide an implementation. A class that contains abstract methods needs to be declared an abstract class. (Interfaces) A class may implement an arbitrary list of interfaces. (Object Cloning) If the developer asks to create a copy of an object by using the reserved word clone, the Zend engine will check if a __clone() method has been defined or not. (Unified Constructors) PHP 5 introduces a standard way of declaring constructor methods by calling them by the name __construct(). (Destructors) PHP 5 introduces a destructor concept similar to that of other object-oriented languages, when the last reference to an object is destroyed, the object's destructor (a class method named __destruct() that receives no parameters) is called before the object is freed from memory. PHP 4 had no exception handling. PHP 5 introduces an exception model similar to that of other programming languages. PHP treats new lines as whitespace, in the manner of a free-form language (except when inside string quotes). Statements are terminated only by a semicolon (;) except in a few special cases.
comment (for single line comment), and /* multi-line comment */ (for multiple line comments). //

PHP includes a large number of free and open-source libraries with the core build. PHP is a fundamentally Internet-aware system with modules built in for accessing FTP servers, many database servers, embedded SQL libraries like embedded MySQL and SQLite, LDAP servers, and others. Many functions familiar to C programmers such as the printf family are available in the standard PHP build.

Programming Language WebQuest

EVALUATION
Readability Characteristics Rating (1-5) Comments Although PHP has a very large feature set of functions and keywords, it takes a considerable amount of effort to read and understand PHP code for the same reason. Also, a lot of PHPs built-in functions are said to be redundant. This is said to make it difficult to program in the language without the frequent consultation of a reference work. PHPs vast feature set includes support for many control structures. Some of the more uncommon ones are include(), include_once(), require(), require_once, and goto all of which allow the code to execute away from the file/line where the control statement is used: which could reduce readability. Also, with include() and require(), dependencies are created which could lead to difficult code maintenance. On the other hand, these features allow a PHP file to be built from several files, which allow programmers to distribute functionality. The weak, dynamic typing of PHP implies that a variable can change type during runtime. This also implies that data structures in PHP can be heterogeneous and its contents, dynamically typed at the same time. Programmers might have to trace these changes as well and could lead to confusing code, especially when debugging. PHP uses the $ sign to name variables which makes it easier to identify them but because PHP syntax is influenced by C/Java, its use of braces for pairing control structures makes it difficult to know which group is being ended. The language allows keywords to be used as identifiers, but this could lead to confusion. Another argument against previous and current stable versions of PHP is the lack of lexical scoping and namespaces (available from alpha release 5.3.0 onwards). This implies that for the most part, all variables are of a global scope and makes for very awkward, unreadable function names.

Simplicity/ Orthogonality

Control Structures

Data type and Structures

Syntax Design

Programming Language WebQuest

Writability Characteristics Rating (1-5) Comments With the same consideration to that of PHPs readability, PHP is infamous for having an unwieldy number of functions and keywords. On the other hand, this allows programmers to do things like connecting to a database with minimal amount of code. Before PHP 3.0, the language had very little support for abstraction. PHP 3.0 saw the introduction of object-oriented features, 4.0 introduced refinements to those features, and 5.0 introduced private and protected member variables and methods, along with abstract classes and abstract methods. It also introduced a standard way of declaring constructor and destructors similar to that of other objectoriented languages, such as C++. In conclusion, while previous versions of PHP generally lacked features which support abstraction, these features are slowly being integrated into the language with every new release. PHP 5.3.0 in particular promises to include namespaces to further abstraction support. PHP is an expression-oriented language, in the sense that almost everything is an expression. For example '$a = 5'. There are two values involved here, the value of the integer constant '5', and the value of $a which is being updated to 5. But there's one additional value involved, the value of the assignment itself. The assignment itself evaluates to the assigned value. It means that '$a = 5', is an expression with the value 5. Thus, writing something like '$b = ($a = 5)' is like writing '$a = 5; $b = 5; Since assignments are parsed in a right to left order, you can also write '$b = $a = 5'. Generally speaking, there are many ways to do things in PHP. Printing out a statement can be done with a wide variety of statements like echo(), print(), etc. PHP is a very flexible language to code in, although at the cost of being at times unstable.

Simplicity/ Orthogonality

Support for abstraction

Expressivity

Programming Language WebQuest Reliability Characteristics Readability Rating (1-5) Comments PHP is touted by some as a language which is quite hard to read. With the huge array of built-in functions, the redundancy of some of those functions, the lack of namespaces for PHPs built-in functions, cryptic error messages, and the difficulty of telling the differences between the ways those functions work, wading through PHP code can be quite a challenge. While PHP may be hard to read, it is easy to write. PHP is a powerful, expressive language and with each new release, more features such as support for objectoriented programming will provide the language with the expressive power similar to OO languages such as Java and C++. A major plus often pointed out about PHP is its ability to allow beginners to get things done. The type of a variable is not usually set by the programmer; rather, it is decided at runtime by PHP depending on the context in which that variable is used. Programmers will often have a hard time trying to evaluate a particular variable type within complex variable type computations. An exception can be thrown, and caught within PHP. PHP has a strong structure for exception handling like other object-oriented programming language. PHP has no restrictions on the use of aliasing. This can often lead to unintended side effects that are difficult to detect especially when debugging.

Writability

Type Checking

Exception Handling

Restricted Aliasing

10

Programming Language WebQuest

SAMPLE PROGRAMS
Hello World:
<html> <body> <?php echo "Hello World"; ?> </body> </html>

Arithmetic with PHP:

<?php if ( $op == "add" ) { echo "$number1 + $number2 = "; echo $number1 + $number2; } if ( $op == "sub" ) { echo "$number1 - $number2 = "; echo $number1 - $number2; } if ( $op == "mul" ) { echo "$number1 * $number2 = "; echo $number1 * $number2; } if ( $op == "div" ) { echo "$number1 / $number2 = "; echo $number1 / $number2; } ?>

11

Programming Language WebQuest

SCREENSHOTS
Running the Hello World Program:

Program Output:

12

Programming Language WebQuest

INSTALLATION
For this section, we will be introducing the BitNami WAPPStack (Windows, Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP) as a distributed binary executable installer for PHP, Apache, and PostgreSQL, all running on Windows XP and can be downloaded from: http://www.bitnami.org/stacks/. WAPPStack is an easy to install software platform that greatly simplifies the deployment of Open Source web stacks on Windows. It includes ready-to-run versions of Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP, phpPgAdmin and required dependencies and installs in minutes. By default the graphical installation mode will be described by the following: 1. You will be greeted by the 'Welcome' screen. Pressing 'Next' will take you to the 'License Agreement' page.

13

Programming Language WebQuest 2. You must accept the agreement to continue the installation. The next step is to select the installation directory. The default installation path will be a folder on your home directory if you are running the installer as a regular user, or /opt/wappstack-1.1-1, if you are running the installation as root. If the destination directory does not exist, it will be created as part of the installation.

14

Programming Language WebQuest 3. After selecting the installation directory you will be asked for the password to the initial PostgreSQL root and postgres accounts. This password cannot be empty.

4. The default listening port for Apache is 8080 and for PostgreSQL is 5432. If those ports are already in use by other applications, you will be prompted for alternate ports to use. Remember that if you plan to run both applications as a regular user you should select port numbers above 1024.

15

Programming Language WebQuest 5. Finally, the installer will ask you for the initial password to access your phpPgAdmin installation through the web. This password cannot be empty. 6. You are now ready to begin the installation, which will start when you press 'Next'.

7. Once the installation process has been completed, you will see the 'Installation Finished' page.

16

Programming Language WebQuest

BIBLIOGRAPHY
BitNami WAPP Stack 1.1-1. INSTALLATION. 28 Jan 2009. BitNami. 4 Feb. 2009. <http://bitnami.org/files/stacks/wappstack/README.txt>

PHP Documentation. 18 Feb 2009. PHP Group.18 Feb. 2009. <http://www.php.net/docs.php>

w3schools.com. Basic PHP Syntax. 1999-2009. W3Schools. 18 Feb. 2009. <http://www.w3schools.com/PHP/php_syntax.asp>

"PHP." Wikipedia. 18 Feb. 2009. Wikimedia Foundation. 18 Feb. 2009. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP >

Genealogical tree of programming languages. Illustration. Wikimedia Foundation. Maximilian Drrbecker. 18 Feb. 2009. <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Genealogical_tree_of_programming_languages.svg>

PHP Criticism. Global Oneness. 18 Feb. 2009. <http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/PHP_-_Criticism/id/5376740>

PHP in contrast to Perl. 18 Feb. 2009. <http://www.tnx.nl/php.html>