Portal:Computer programming/Selected article/7

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It is one of the first developed server-side scripting languages that is embedded into a HTML source document, rather than calling an external file to process data. Ultimately, the code is interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module which generates the resulting web page. It also has evolved to include a command-line interface capability and can be used in standalone graphical applications. PHP can be deployed on most web servers and also as a standalone shell on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. A competitor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) server-side script engine and similar languages, PHP is installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers.