The PHP language evolved without a written formal specification or standard until 2014, with the original implementation acting as the de facto standard which other implementations aimed to follow. PHP has been widely ported and can be deployed on most web servers on a variety of operating systems and platforms. The standard PHP interpreter, powered by the Zend Engine, is free software released under the PHP License.

PHP code can also be directly executed from the command line. Additionally, PHP can be used for many programming tasks outside the web context, such as standalone graphical applications and robotic drone control.

Various web template systems, web content management systems, and web frameworks exist which can be employed to orchestrate or facilitate the generation of that response. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code – which may be any type of data, such as generated HTML or binary image data – would form the whole or part of an HTTP response. PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter implemented as a module, a daemon or as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executable. PHP was originally an abbreviation of Personal Home Page, but it now stands for the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development.

Perl, HTML, C, C++, Java, Tcl, JavaScript, Hack Zend Engine, HHVM, PeachPie, Quercus, Parrot Only PHP License (most of Zend engine under Zend Engine License) for 3.01x and later versions. Unix-like, Windows, macOS, IBM i, OpenVMSĭual licensed GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version and PHP License for PHP versions 3.0 or earlier.

Phpmaker 2021 full