Informatics International College North Gate Campus

Software Engineering

RSN: Resort Search and Navigational Tool

Ramon B. Pama Jr. Ivan De Vera Joboni Jesus Lim Gladys Cruz Don Christian Valdez
Proponents

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Description What is PHP?

PHP is a widely used open source, general-purpose scripting language. It was originally designed for use in Web site development. In fact, PHP started life as Personal Home Page tools, developed by Rasmus Lerdorf to assist users with Web page tasks. PHP proved so useful and popular, it rapidly grew to become the full-featured language that it is today, acquiring the name PHP Hypertext Pre-processor along the way to represent its expanded abilities processing Web pages before theyre displayed. PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document. It also has evolved to include a command-line interface capability and can be used in standalone graphical applications. PHP can be deployed on most web servers and as a standalone interpreter, on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. There is also commercial software such as RadPHP, a rapid application development framework for the PHP language. A competitor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) server-side script engine and similar languages, PHP is installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers. (www.wikipedia.com)

Reasons for Usage Advantages Its fast: On Web sites, because it is embedded in HTML code, the time to process and load a Web page is short. Its free: PHP is proof that free lunches do exist and that you can get more than you paid for. Its easy to use: The syntax is simple and easy to understand and use, even for non-programmers. For use in Web sites, PHP code is designed to be included easily in an HTML file. Its versatile: PHP runs on a wide variety of operating systems Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and most varieties of Unix. Technical support is widely available: You can join one of several e-mail discussion lists offered on the PHP Web site (www.php.net), which cover topics such as general PHP, PHP on Windows, or databases and PHP. In addition, a Web interface to the discussion lists is available at news.php.net, where you can browse or search the messages. Its secure: As long as your scripts are designed correctly, the user does not see the PHP code. Its customizable: The open source license allows programmers to modify the PHP software, adding or modifying features as needed to fit their own environments. PHP provides significant control over the environment, reducing chances of failure.

Disadvantages Passing information in the URL is easy, especially for small amounts of information. However, this method has some disadvantages, including some important security issues. Here are some reasons you may not want to pass information in the URL:

The whole world can see it. The URL is shown in the address line of the browser, which means that the information you attach to the URL is also shown. If the information needs to be secure, you dont want it shown so publicly. For example, if youre moving a password from one page to the next, you probably dont want to pass it in the URL.

A user can send information in the URL, just as easily as you can. For example, suppose that after a user logs into your restricted Web site, you add auth=yes to the URL. On each Web page, you check to see if $_GET [auth] = yes. If so, you let the user see the Web page. However, any user can type http://www.yoursite.com/page.php?auth=yes into his browser and be allowed to enter without logging in.

The user can bookmark the URL. You may not want your users to save the information you add to the URL.

The length of the URL is limited. The limit differs for various browsers and browser versions, but a limit always exists. Therefore, if youre passing a lot of information, the URL may not have room for it.

Significance of the system / Programming Language Computer nowadays have different specifications, applications, softwares and they run through different operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS, Linux. Web-Based programming languages that are powered by databases requires database server softwares for it to run at is 100% capacity, there are several web-based programming languages that can be used for a webpage to run so why choose PHP instead of ASP.NET, HTML, XML Etc.?

PHP can support different database servers which is a great advantage since it would be compatible to almost every single computer manufactured. On the other hand ASP, HTML, XML can only support less database servers and these languages have several prerequisites for it to function properly.

We Developers are very much trained on using the C++ Programming Language and compared to PHP, as programmers, we are more comfortable using PHP compared to ASP because PHP uses C/C++ as base language and most syntax are similar to each other. Because a big chunk of programmers are still using C++ language, PHP are by far more popular than ASP. Cost-wise, PHP can be connected to free database servers compared to other languages.