“Use PHP? We’re Not Building a Website, You Know!”
Both its current recursive moniker (PHP: PHP HyperText Preprocessor) and the name originally bestowed upon it by its creator Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP: Personal Home Page) reinforce the widely held view that PHP is a scripting language for the Web. And that was true back in 1995 when PHP was first created and for a number of years afterward. In the web arena, PHP excels. It’s easy to use, quick to develop in, widely deployed, and tightly integrated into web stacks (it’s usually the P in LAMP, WAMP, MAMP, and so on), and of course it is free and open source.
But many people don’t realize (or haven’t noticed ...
