What can PHP do?

Anything. PHP is mainly focused on server-side scripting, so you can do anything any other CGI program can do, such as collect form data, generate dynamic page content, or send and receive cookies. But PHP can do much more.

There are three main fields where PHP scripts are used.

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 outputing 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.

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 DIngresOracle (OCI7 and OCI8)
dBaseInterBaseOvrimos
EmpressFrontBasePostgreSQL
FilePro (read-only)mSQLSolid
HyperwaveDirect MS-SQLSybase
IBM DB2MySQLVelocis
InformixODBCUnix 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 ecommerce field, you'll find the Cybercash payment, CyberMUT, Verysign 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.