What is PHP Used For?
PHP began as a small project, but it has become one of the widely-used open-source scripting languages with time. The first version of PHP was unleashed in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. You can do many things with PHP because it is simple, efficient, secure, and flexible.
Uses of PHP
- Encrypt Data
Data security is one of the most critical aspects of technology today. Most people have fallen into the hands of cyberbullies and lost some of their sensitive data. Also, organizations such as banks and learning institutions have found themselves in the trap of hackers and their accounts stolen with lots of money. But with PHP, you can keep your data safe.
Do you know you can secure your sensitive data and passwords using PHP? You can protect your data from hackers using different PHP methods such as hashing, envelope encryption, and secret key encryption.
- User Authentication
When you are building your website, you need to incorporate user authentication for web security. You can do different types of authentications with PHP, such as two-step, username, and password. With PHP, you can form a two-step or more authentication for any of your applications. This scripting language has the power to generate a secure random number and send it to your mail inbox.
PHP can store and retrieve your website passwords and username quickly and safely. When it comes to cookies, PHP Sessions help to handle cookie-based login sessions. For the security of your application, you can choose to manage the cookies personally.
- Handling HTML Form Data
You can create, retrieve and process your HTML form data using a scripting language such as PHP. The process is simple to follow all through. You can either use the GET or POST method to process your HTML form. After the forms are processed, you can capture them and retrieve them later.
- Supporting Database
Do you want your database to be simple? PHP has the ability to do it. It supports several database systems, including;
- MySQL
- Oracle
- Microsoft SQL
- PostgreSQL
- SQLite
You can use PHP to add, delete and modify data in your database system. Also, when using PHP in your database, you shouldn’t worry-why? Because it allows you to implement secure SQL through prepared statements and to escape. In MySQL, the PDO extension will help to generate secure SQL code and robust.
- Control User-access
When you have an application, you must handle user access by monitoring each specific user who accesses specific content. In most cases, there are regular users and administrative users. Regular users should only view content relevant to them.
With PHP, you can restrict users from accessing some pages of your website. When you manage your user access, your database remains safe. This is because the administrative users can see all the others users. Therefore, when sensitive information falls in the wrong hand, you can retrieve and secure it.
- WordPress Operations
Do you have a WordPress website, and you wish to operate it smoothly? PHP is here for you. The scripting language helps you to run the themes and plugins. Hence, your website content will rank higher on Google or any other platform, and as a result, you will earn good money.
- Creating Images
Creating images is one of the benefits that PHP provides, mainly if you want CAPTCHA images. Also, it makes it easier to generate a logo or banner on the fly, just as other blogging software. After creating your image, you can add its background colors, text, set its thickness, and draw a line. You can send the image to a web browser or save it.
- Real-Time Applications
Some of the real-time applications you interact with are monitoring systems, bots, web games, and chats. You can build these applications with PHP and other programming languages such as JavaScript.
- Generate Dynamic Page Content
Dynamic page content enhances the usefulness of your website and improves visitors’ functions. As a result, it makes users visit your site regularly. With PHP, you can have this helpful feature on your website. This will drive traffic to your site and enjoy the benefits such as conversions and sales.
- Creating Web Services
Web services are becoming more popular, and you can use a thousand of them to update your E-Commerce business. PHP helps to write web services. You can use this scripting language to create basic web services that provide an XML or JSON.
Why Use PHP?
- You can use PHP in all major operating systems.
Most of the operating systems used today can support PHP. Linux, Microsoft Windows, OS, UNIX variants, and OS are some of the systems that work with PHP. Also, it supports most web servers such as IIS, Apache, among others. Therefore, with this scripting language, you have the freedom to use any operating system you have.
- It supports most of the databases.
With PHP, you can generate a wide range of databases for your application. You can integrate it with MySQL, Sybase, Informix, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle.
- Works with major protocols
PHP supports major protocols such as LDAP, POP3, IMAP, HTTP, and SNMP, which you can use to talk to other services. Besides, you can open a new network socket for your interaction needs with other protocols. Finally, it supports the instantiation of Java objects and uses them as PHP objects transparently.
- It has useful text processing features.
This scripting language has essential text processing features such as Perl, which works with regular expressions (PCRE). Also, it has many extensions and tools to access and parse XML documents.
- With PHP, you aren’t limited to HTML.
PHP can output beyond HTML. You can generate PDF files, images, and Flash movies using it. Also, you can get texts such as XHTML and any other XML file type. Finally, it can auto-generate these files and save them in the file system.
- PHP is Free
You can get PHP free of charge. You can download it from the official PHP resource.
PHP is an essential scripting language in the technological world. Besides, its uses and benefits are numerous. It is applicable in most operating systems used today, and it is simple to use.