Introducing PHP Learning About PHP and Server-Side Programming This article describes what PHP and server-side technologies are and walks you through creating your first PHP pages. This article assumes that you are already comfortable with HTML and you're interested in learning more about other Web technologies. PHP is a commonly used, simple, yet powerful Web server scripting language used forembedding dynamic content into HTML Web pages. PHP stands for PHP: HypertextPreprocessor. PHP is a server-side scripting language. What distinguishes PHP from something likeclient-side JavaScript is that the code is executed on the server. This means that the serverexecutes your script and translates the content to HTML before sending it to your Webbrowser. All of the heavy lifting and computing is done on the server.