Datasheet

Chapter 1 ✦ Why PHP and MySQL?

some behind-the-scenes precompiling into an intermediate form for greater speed with

complex scripts.

But what if you happen to want compilation? This can be desirable if you wish to distribute

nonreversible binaries so others can use the code without being able to look at the source.

The Zend team now offers a precompiler, Zend Encoder, which will deliver the code in a non-

reversible intermediate representation, as well as substantially speed up large complex PHP

scripts.

Cross-platform compatibility

PHP and MySQL run native on every popular flavor of Unix (including Mac OS X) and Windows.

A huge percentage of the world’s HTTP servers run on one of these two classes of operating

systems.

PHP is compatible with the three leading Web servers: Apache HTTP Server for Unix and

Windows, Microsoft Internet Information Server, and Netscape Enterprise Server (a.k.a.

iPlanet Server). It also works with several lesser-known servers, including Alex Belits’ fhttpd,

Microsoft’s Personal Web Server, AOLServer, and Omnicentrix’s Omniserver application

server. Specific Web-server compatibility with MySQL is not required, since PHP will handle

all the dirty work for you.

Table 1-2 shows a brief matrix of the possible OS/Web-server combinations.

Table 1-2: Operating Systems and Web Servers for PHP

Variables UNIX Windows

Flavors AIX, A/UX, BSDI, Digital UNIX/Tru64, Windows 95/98/ME

FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows NT/2000/XP/2003

NetBSD, OpenBSD, SCO UnixWare,

Solaris, SunOS, Ultrix, Xenix, and more

Web servers Apache, fhttpd, Netscape IIS, PWS, Netscape, Apache, Omni

Now that PHP runs on Macintosh, PHP is almost totally cross-platform. You can develop on

almost any client OS using your favorite tools and then upload your PHP scripts to a server

on almost any OS. We’ll discuss the development process in more detail in Chapter 3.

Not tag-based

PHP is a real programming language. ColdFusion, by contrast, is a bunch of predefined tags,

like HTML. In PHP, you can define functions to your heart’s content just by typing a name and

a definition. In ColdFusion, you have to use tags developed by other people or go through the

Custom Tag Extension development process.

As a witty PHP community member once said, “ColdFusion makes easy things easy, and

medium-hard things impossible.” And as every programmer will agree, once you experience

the power of curly brackets and loops, you never go back to tags.

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