PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language that lets you create dynamic web pages. PHP-enabled web pages are treated just like regular HTML pages and you can create and edit them the same way you normally create regular HTML pages.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is an open source server side programming language extensively used for web scripts and to process data passed via the Common Gateway Interface from HTML forms etc. PHP can be written as scripts that reside on the server and may produce HTML output that downloads to the web browser

PHP offers a simple and universal solution for easy-to-program dynamic Web pages. PHP's syntax is similar to that of C and Perl. Its elegant design makes PHP significantly easier to maintain and update than comparable scripts in other languages.

PHP offers excellent connectivity to most of the common databases (including Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, ODBC and many others), and offers integration with various external libraries, which allow the developer to do anything from generating PDF documents to parsing XML.