The PHP Story
Ever since Web designers found out about the [FORM] tag, the Internet has seen an explosion in the number of Websites that depend heavily on user response and interactivity. For a long time, the primary language used to develop such Websites was Perl. But ask any novice programmer, and he'll tell you that learning Perl isn't exactly a bed of roses...
As a result, there has been a proliferation of alternative server-side scripting languages, which perform many of the tasks previously handled by Perl, but have a shorter learning curve. The most well known of these are ASP and PHP; while the former works primarily on the Windows platform in combination with a clutch of proprietary products, the latter has the unique distinction of being an open-source server-side scripting language that's both fun and easy to learn. Today, it is estimated that more than 1,000,000 Web sites use PHP as a server side scripting language.
PHP was first developed by Rasmus Lerdorf as a means of monitoring page views for his online resume, and slowly started making a mark when PHP/FI was released in mid-1995. This version of PHP had support for some basic Web functions - the ability to handle form data, support for the mSQL database, and more.
As PHP's popularity grew, the development of the language shifted from Rasmus to a team of dedicated programmers who took upon themselves the burden of rewriting the PHP parser from scratch. The result of the efforts was PHP 3.0, which included support for a wider range of databases, including MySQL and Oracle. And PHP 4.0, which was released in the summer of 2000, uses the powerful new Zend scripting engine to deliver better performance, supports Web servers other than Apache, and comes with in-built support for session management.
At present DaySite fully supports PHP3 which is installed on the server. PHP4 will be supported after all of the bugs get worked out, probably by January 2001.
Page Extensions
To use PHP on the DaySite servers, simply change your page extension to:
.phtml
or
.php3
