What Is PHP?
PHP is an open source programming language that can be used to create dynamic web pages and applications. PHP draws upon C, Java and Perl that allows it to run on a variety of platforms and work with many different databases. Its popularity among the web development community stems from the way PHP enabled pages are treated the same as HTML pages, simplifying matters considerably for the programmer.

What Are The Benefits Of PHP?
PHP is very easy to learn. It works with almost any Operating System (OS), supports a wide variety of databases and communication between many protocols such as POP3, LDAP, SNMP, HTTP, COM and IMAP. Because it is a server side technology (data is processed on the web server) you can have highly interactive websites that output HTML, PDF files, Flash movies and XHTML without your visitors having to install any software.

What Is The Zend Optimizer?
After PHP 3.0 was officially released, work began on a rewrite of PHP’s core. The design goal was to improve performance of complex applications and improve the modularity of PHP’s code base. Such applications were made possible by PHP 3.0’s new features and its support for a wide variety of third party databases and API’s (Application Program Interfaces) but PHP 3.0 was not designed to handle complex applications efficiently.

The new engine created is Zend Optimizer which goes over the intermediate code generated by the standard Zend run-time compiler and optimizes it for faster execution. In addition, the Zend Optimizer enables PHP to load and execute files encoded by the Zend Encoder.

What Version Of PHP Does The Current Zend Optimizer Work With?
The current version works only with PHP 4, PHP 5 and above.

What Platforms Does The Zend Optimizer Support?
The current version works in Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows, IBM, AIX and HP-UX. Work is underway to support more popular web server platforms. Recently added is support for Mac OS X and Solaris x86.

How Does PHP Compare To ASP?
PHP is Open Source software, which means that code, manual, updates and support are all provided free for anyone to use. Although the ASP script engine comes included with IIS and PWS, minimal support is available free. Running Microsoft operating systems at a commercial level is always costly.

ASP will also likely never be as fast as PHP due to the architecture. When an ASP programmer uses VBScript, he is running a COM object. This means when he writes a client, he is calling the Response COM. When he accesses a database, he uses abouth COM object. Then, when he accesses the file system, he is using yet another COM object. These objects add up and slow things down whereas PHP modules run on PHP memory making it faster and more efficient. PHP also has superior memory management over ASP because it only uploads the files that are required. With ASP, if a file example, header.asp is referenced in twenty web pages then twenty copies of the file are maintained in memory.

There are also no additional costs with PHP. Everything is built into it. With ASP, you need to purchase separate licenses for encryption, mail management and file uploading and so on.

What Can PHP Do For My Website?
You can add a lot of interactivity & professionalism with PHP driven scripts such as:

Live support, content management systems, collaboration areas for your staff, shopping carts, forums, web based email, catalog with inventory search, product reviews, news, content syndication, mail senders, newsletter managers and more. To find more examples, do a search on your favorite search engine for “PHP Scripts”.

My Script Developer Says It Needs A Module Before It Will Work. What Does That Mean?
PHP has modular capabilities, meaning you can add modules to it to extend functionality. Some scripts depend on a particular add on to PHP to run. You may check with with us at support@w3hub.com to see if the module already exists.

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