PHP is a general-purpose, server-side scripting language, the relative simplicity and versatility of which, at the time, has arguably been one of the main reasons for the boom of web development as we know it today and why PHP is used in so many projects.
First appearing in 1994, PHP — recursively short for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor — now powers innumerable websites, from the smallest blogs to some of the most popular web services in the world. On github there are more than 50 000 projects developed in PHP.
While, once upon a time, PHP may have been criticized by some programmers, the current version (stable version 7.1.4) has an incredible improvement over those times, and PHP has grown into a language that can easily compete with others, like Javascript or Ruby, for back-end supremacy. Its frameworks provide good front-end support as well.
PHP was originally used embedded in HTML, but, nowadays, it is mostly used in the form of (frameworks). It is the 4th most active repository programming language on Github, trailing only Javascript, Java, and Python, and, as such, it offers a very wide selection of pre-made libraries you might need for your project. The most important players, however, are PHP Frameworks:
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