What can PHP do?
PHP can be used on all major operating
systems, including Linux, many Unix variants (including
HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X,
RISC OS, and probably others. PHP has also support for most
of the web servers today. This includes Apache, Microsoft
Internet Information Server, Personal Web Server, Netscape
and iPlanet servers, Oreilly Website Pro server, Caudium,
Xitami, OmniHTTPd, and many others. For the majority of
the servers PHP has a module, for the others supporting
the CGI standard, PHP can work as a CGI processor.
So with PHP, you have the freedom of choosing an operating
system and a web server. Furthermore, you also have the
choice of using procedural programming or object oriented
programming, or a mixture of them. Although not every standard
OOP feature is realized in the current version of PHP, many
code libraries and large applications (including the PEAR
library) are written only using OOP code.
With PHP you are not limited to output HTML. PHP's abilities
includes outputting images, PDF files and even Flash movies
(using libswf and Ming) generated on the fly. You can also
output easily any text, such as XHTML and any other XML
file. PHP can autogenerate these files, and save them in
the file system, instead of printing it out, forming a server-side
cache for your dynamic content.
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