Professional Website Design

PHP is the most commonly used general purpose scripting language, especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. Designed originally for creating dynamic web page, PHP website development has evolved to include a command line interface capability and can also be used in standalone graphical applications. As a widely used general purpose scripting language, PHP functions on a web server taking PHP code as its input, followed by creating web pages as its output.

Uses of PHP in website design

As a computer scripting language, PHP primarily suits for web development purpose. Taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as its output, PHP can easily be deployed at the web servers and on almost every operating system and can be easily used with many relational database management systems. It can also be used for command line scripting and client side GUI applications.

PHP not only acts as a filter, it also provides a complete source code for users to customize, build and extend their purpose. Originally designed to create dynamic web page, PHP’s principal focus lies in server side scripting and is synonymous to server side scripting languages that provides dynamic content from a web server to a client like the Microsoft’s ASP.NET system, Sun Microsystems, Java server pages and more. It has also attracted the development of many frameworks providing building blocks and design structure to promote application development.

PHP has gained so much popularity in the web industry that over 20 million Internet domains are hosted on servers with PHP installed. Recognized as the most popular Apache module, PHP has the power of designing and writing significant websites including the user-facing portion of Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo and more.

Speed optimization

Like other scripting languages, PHP scripts are normally kept as human readable source code even on production web servers. So, these PHP scripts will be compiled at runtime by the PHP engine. Remember, compiling at runtime increases the execution time of the script as it adds an extra step in runtime.

The nature of PHP compiler is such that there are often opportunities for code optimization. Code optimizers improve the quality of compiled code by reducing its size and making some changes reducing the execution time performance improvement. Similar is the nature of PHP accelerators, which can offer vital performance gains by catching the compiled form of a PHPscript in shared memory to compile the code, every time the script runs.

Security code of PHP website design

There are advanced protection patches such as Suhosin and Hardening patch that are specially designed for web hosting environments. The proportion of insecure software written in PHP is plenty. The most common vulnerabilities are caused by not following best practice programming rules as well as the vulnerabilities related to software written in old PHP versions. Well for added security, it is prescribed to install PHP as a CGI binary rather than as an Apache module.

Data Types of PHP

PHP is known to store whole numbers in a platform dependant range. This range is very much like that of 32-bit signed integers. In certain situations, it is often found that the unsigned integers are converted to signed values. Integer variables can be assigned using decimal, octal and hexadecimal notations. This is not real numbers are also stored in a platform specific range that are specified using floating-point notation or scientific notations.

PHP has a native Boolean type that is very much akin to native Boolean types in Java and C++. By utilizing the Boolean type conversion rules non-zero values are interpreted as true and zero as false. The null data type represents a variable that has no value. While, the variables of the resource type indicates references to be resourced from external sources. These are created typically by functions from a definite extension and can only be processed by functions from the same extensions.

Know how PHP Functions

PHP comprises of hundreds of base functions and thousands more from extensions. Object handling plays a vital role in PHP website development. Basic object oriented programming functionality has been added in PHP 3 while object handling was rewritten for PHP 5 to enhance the performance and to expand the feature set. There are some special interfaces that allow objects to interact with the runtime system.

While talking about resources, PHP ensures free and open source libraries with the core build. As a fundamentally internet aware system with modules built in for accessing FTP servers, PHP allows developers to write extensions in C and to add functionality to the PHP language. This can then be compiled into PHP or loaded dynamically at runtime.