What can PHP do?
One of the strongest and most significant
feature in PHP is its support for a wide range of databases.
Writing a database-enabled web page is incredibly simple.
The following databases are currently supported:
Adabas D Ingres Oracle (OCI7 and OCI8)
dBase InterBase Ovrimos
Empress FrontBase PostgreSQL
FilePro (read-only) mSQL Solid
Hyperwave Direct MS-SQL Sybase
IBM DB2 MySQL Velocis
Informix ODBC Unix dbm
We also have a DBX database abstraction extension allowing
you to transparently use any database supported by that
extension. Additionally PHP supports ODBC, the Open Database
Connection standard, so you can connect to any other database
supporting this world standard.
PHP also has support for talking to other services using
protocols such as LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP, COM
(on Windows) and countless others. You can also open raw
network sockets and interact using any other protocol. PHP
has support for the WDDX complex data exchange between virtually
all Web programming languages. Talking about interconnection,
PHP has support for instantiation of Java objects and using
them transparently as PHP objects. You can also use our
CORBA extension to access remote objects.
PHP has extremely useful text processing features, from
the POSIX Extended or Perl regular expressions to parsing
XML documents. For parsing and accessing XML documents,
we support the SAX and DOM standards. You can use our XSLT
extension to transform XML documents.
While using PHP in the e-commerce field, you'll find the
Cybercash payment, CyberMUT, VeriSign Payflow Pro and CCVS
functions useful for your online payment programs.
At last but not least, we have many other interesting extensions,
the mnoGoSearch search engine functions, the IRC Gateway
functions, many compression utilities (gzip, bz2), calendar
conversion, translation...
As you can see this page is not enough to list all the
features and benefits PHP can offer. Read on in the sections
about installing PHP, and see the function reference part
for explanation of the extensions mentioned here.
