PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a computer scripting language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. It is used mainly in server-side scripting, but can be used from a command line interface or in standalone graphical applications.
PHP was written as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries in the C programming language by the Danish/Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage. Lerdorf initially created PHP to display his résumé and to collect certain data, such as how much traffic his page was receiving. Personal Home Page Tools was publicly released on 8 June 1995 in order to speed up the process of finding bugs and to help improve the code more quickly, after Lerdorf combined it with his own Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI (this release is considered PHP version 2), which had more functionality, including a much larger C implementation which was used to communicate with databases, and helped developers to build simple, dynamic web applications. At this point, PHP already included some of the basic functionality that exist in PHP today, such as Perl-like variables, form handling, and the ability to embed HTML. The syntax was built to be similar to Perl, but was more limited, simple, and less consistent in comparison.
PHP is currently the most popular Apache module among all servers using Apache as a web server. Among all currently existing computer programming languages, it is considered the fourth most popular, ranked only behind Java, C, and Visual Basic
