Building a site based on changing data is a major problem, if you don't have the tools. If you could imagine an Internet directory like Yahoo editing thousands or even millions of HTML files, you would understand the necessity for a tool like PHP4. To give you a better Idea on why you would use this tool, I'll start with how a group of people, including myself, found its usefulness.

We are building a website. This website is basically an Internet directory for businesses to come, input their information, and allow others to browse through the directory looking for businesses. When it comes down to it, it's basically an Internet Yellow pages of sorts.

When I joined this company, the people involved in the site already had very little technical knowledge. They had several listing in their page already. When you entered their current page, it would display a list of states, which you could click on. Once you click on a state, it would bring up a list of cities where businesses had been entered. You could click on a city, and be presented with another page full of categories similar to what you would find in a telephone directory. And then, once again, you would click on a category to be displayed a list of businesses in that category. So, if you add all of this together, 1 business may require you to edit up to FOUR pages of HTML. Imagine having 10,000 entries into this page, you would have to edit these pages between 20,000 and 40,000 times. Then you have to worry if the pages will look the same, be consistent, and if someone wants to be removed, you have to find them in all of your pages.

This server side scripting tools helps you eliminate all of these. You can use a database, which contains all your businesses, states, cities, categories and the like. It's also proven very useful as a billing system, which is completely automated. This tool has eliminated the number of files in their system from 18,000 html files to 18 php/html files. Every page has the same consistency.

Performance wise, it's fast. The website claims PHP4 is faster than ASP, and for the performance I've seen, I would believe it. Most of all, the scripting portion of your web site is limited by the speed of your database, not your scripting language.

PHP4 is very affordable. In fact, it's FREE. It's a C-like syntax language, which is currently interpreted. However, there is a PHP4 compiler coming out with in the next year to allow easy distribution of commercially sold applications written in PHP.

PHP4 does require a good amount of computer knowledge to install, run, and program with. Even though, as stated above, it has a C-like syntax, many things are different, and it does take time to get to know the software.

Yahoo uses a database and scripting language similar (I'm not sure what they use) to design their website. With this software, some free database software and a lot of spare time; you could build the next Yahoo.




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