What projects can I do with PHP?
Three main areas of using PHP scripts.
Server side script. This is the most traditional and main target area of PHP. You need three things to finish this job. PHP parser (CGI or server module), Web server and Web browser. You need to run a web server to install a connected PHP. You can use a Web browser to access the output of PHP programs and view PHP pages through the server. All these can be run on your local machine, if you just experience PHP programming. For more information, please refer to the installation guide section.
Command line script. You can run PHP scripts without any server or browser. This method only needs a PHP parser. This is an ideal usage when the regular script extension uses cron (in Unix or Linux) or task scheduler (in Windows). These scripts can also be used for simple word processing tasks. For more information, please refer to [command line usage of [PHP].
Write desktop applications. PHP may not be the best programming language for creating desktop applications with graphical user interfaces, but if you know PHP very well and are willing to use some advanced PHP functions in your client applications, you can also use PHP-GTK to write such programs. You can also write cross-platform applications in this way. PHP-GTK is a PHP extension and is not included in the main distribution. If you are interested in PHP-GTK, you can visit its own website.
PHP can be used in all major operating systems, including Linux, many different Unixes (including HP -UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS and so on. PHP now also supports most Web servers. This includes Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Personal Web Server, Netscape and iPlanet Server, Oreilly Websita Pro Server, Caudium, Xitami, OmniHTTPd and so on. Mainstream servers provide PHP services in the form of modules, others support CGI standards, and PHP can work as a CGI processor.
By using PHP, you can freely choose the operating system and network server. In addition, you can choose to use procedural programming or object-oriented programming, or a mixture of the two. Although not every standard OOP feature is implemented in PHP 4, most code bases and large-scale applications (including PEAR libraries) are written in OOP code. PHP 5 makes up for the OOP-related weaknesses in PHP 4 and introduces a complete object model.
With PHP, you are not limited to outputting HTML. PHP's capabilities include outputting pictures, PDF files, and even rapidly generated Flash movies (using libswf and Ming). You can also output any simple text, such as XHTML and any other XML file. PHP can automatically generate these files and save them in the file system instead of printing them, forming a server-side cache for your dynamic content.
One of the most powerful and important features of PHP is that it provides extensive database support. It is so simple to write a web page that enables database support. The following list is the currently supported databases:
Adabas d
database
the Queen
FilePro (read only)
Superwave
IBM DB2
Informix
Angel
InterBase
Frontier base
mSQL
Direct MS-SQL
relational database
Open database connectivity
Oracle(OCI7 and OCI8)
Aubry Moss
A database system
SQLite
solid
Sebes
Velocci.
Unix dbm
We also have a database abstraction extension (called PDO) that allows you to transparently use any supported database. In addition, PHP also supports ODBC (Open Database Connection Standard), so you can connect to any other database that supports this world-class standard.
PHP also supports conversations with other services that use LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP, COM (in Windows). You can also open the original network socket and interact with it using any other protocol. PHP also supports complex WDDX data interaction between all Web programming language visualizations. Through interactive dialogue, PHP also supports instantiation of Java objects and transparently uses them as PHP objects. You can also use our CORBA extension to access remote objects.
PHP has a very useful word processing feature, which uses POSIX Extended or Perl regular expressions to parse XML files. Regarding parsing and accessing XML documents, PHP 4 also supports SAX and DOM standards, and you can also use SXLT extensions to transform XML documents. PHP 5 standardizes all XML extensions of libxml2 entity foundation and adds SimpleXML and XMLReader support to the extended feature set.
Last but not least, we have many other interesting extensions, such as mnoGoSearch search engine function, IRC gateway function, many compression utilities (gzip, bz2, zip), calendar conversion and translation. ...
It is the same as the incomplete list of features and benefits provided by PHP you see on this page. See the installation section about PHP and the functional reference section mentioned by various extensions.