PHP

        PHP is a general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to server-side web development where 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 Web sites or elsewhere PHP acts primarily as a filter, taking input from a file or stream containing text and/or PHP instructions and outputting another stream of data; most commonly the output will be HTML. Since PHP 4, the PHP parser compiles input to produce bytecode for processing by the Zend Engine, giving improved performance over its interpreter predecessor.

Originally designed to create dynamic Web pages, PHP now focuses mainly on server-side scripting, and it is similar to other server-side scripting languages that provide dynamic content from a Web server to a client, such as Microsoft's ASP.NET, Sun Microsystems' JavaServer Pages, and mod_perl. PHP has also attracted the development of many frameworks that provide building blocks and a design structure to promote rapid application development (RAD). Some of these include CakePHP, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Yii Framework, and Zend Framework, offering features similar to other web application frameworks.

The LAMP architecture has become popular in the Web industry as a way of deploying Web applications. PHP is commonly used as the P in this bundle alongside Linux, Apache and MySQL,

Security

About 30% of all vulnerabilities listed on the National Vulnerability Database are linked to PHP. These vulnerabilities are caused mostly by not following best practice programming rules: technical security flaws of the language itself or of its core libraries are not frequent. Recognizing that programmers make mistakes, some languages include taint checking to detect automatically the lack of input validation which induces many issues. Such a feature is being developed for PHP, but its inclusion in a release has been rejected several times in the past. There are advanced protection patches such as Suhosin and Hardening-Patch, especially designed for Web hosting environments.

PHPIDS adds security to any PHP application to defend against intrusions.