PHP, which stands for "Hypertext Preprocessor", is a server-side, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with some unique features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow Web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly.PHP is especially lightweight and speedy. Without any process creation overhead, it can return results quickly, but it doesn't require the tuning of mod_perl to keep your server's memory image small.

PHP offers excellent connectivity to many databases including MySQL, Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Solid, PostgreSQL, and Generic ODBC. The popular PHP-MySQL combination (both are open-source products) is available on almost every UNIX host. Being web-oriented, PHP also contains all the functions to do things on the Internet - connecting to remote servers, checking email via POP3 or IMAP, url encoding, setting cookies, redirecting, etc.