It is hard to imagine nowadays that PHP was originally created just to count the number of visitors to a homepage. In fact, PHP was originally called Personal Home Page. However, the benefits of PHP were soon realized and the developments that have taken place over the years have turned it into a fantastic programming language.
Hypertext Preprocessor or PHP has actually made the web what it is today. The flexibility and dynamism of the language have enabled many radical concepts to come to life. Social Networking giant Facebook may never have experienced success if not for the advances made in PHP development. In fact Web 2.0 owes a lot to this language.
Part of the language’s success is also due to its ability to interact with relational databases. Particularly its symbiotic relationship with MySQL has made many ungainly and resource hungry processes simple and efficient. Retrieving information from databases and displaying them online has never been this easy before. The enormously successful Blogging website, WordPress is made possible by PHP and MySQL working together. The database powering the blog holds all the individual blogs and serves them up as and when they are requested.
Dynamic websites are easier to maintain and update. Updating pages does not mean that new pages have to be coded anew. Instead, updates can be added just like updating a blog. Pages can be generated based on settings, and served up dynamically for the user who is requesting them. The ability to generate dynamic pages has been one of the key reasons of the explosive growth of the internet.