PHP is a general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to server-side web development, in which case PHP generally runs on a web server. Any PHP code in a requested file is executed by the PHP runtime, usually to create dynamic web page content or dynamic images used on websites or elsewhere.

PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML.

There are many reasons to use PHP for server side programming, firstly it is a free language with no licensing fees so the cost of using it is minimal. A good benefit of using PHP is that it can interact with many different database languages including MySQL. PHP can also run on Windows, Linux and Unix servers.