Every major website uses some amount of server side scripting

Example:

Amazon.com uses it to find books Yahoo! Uses to store personal preferences Maybank2u.com uses it to store clients information and do financial transactions

Server-side scripts run on the web server, usually is a powerful UNIX or Microsoft Windows System (or Linux). The scripts can access server resources, such as DB or external files. Server-side scripts can store a users shopping cart in a DB and retrieve it later from different machines This improves customer experience (it doesnt matter where they log in from as the setting are done at the server and not the client)

Among things you can do:

i. Build a search engine that responds to query ii. Record user input provided through web forms and save it for future reference iii. Create web sites that can update its content dynamically iv. Process electronic payments and track customer orders v. Build customized bar graphs, etc from raw numerical data vi. Carry out online surveys

Linux/Windows operating system Apache web server MySQL relational database management system PHP server-side scripting language Usually such applications are developed on so called LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) platform where each component plays its role:

Linux provides the base OS and server environment Apache web server intercepts HTTP requests and either serves them directly or passes them on to the PHP interpreter for execution PHP interpreter parses and executes PHP code and returns the results to the web server The MySQL RDBMS serves as data storage engine, accepting connections from PHP layer and inserting, modifying and retrieving data

It is a widely used general purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML It allows developers to write dynamically generated web pages quickly It supports wide range of DB systems PHP code embedded into HTML document, recognized and executed by web server when document is requested through a browser Server will execute the codes and return the output to the browser in the format you specify Because it is executed at server side and not client side, developers dont have to worry about browser specific quirks that could cause the code to break (as happens with JS); PHP code works independently of the users web browser

High performance (www.zend.com) Interfaces to many different database systems Built in libraries for many common web tasks Low cost Ease of learning Strong object-oriented support Portability Availability of source code Availability of support and documentation

High Performance (web.mysql.com/benchmark.html) Low cost Ease of use Portability Availability of source code Availability of support

PHP http://www.php.net/ MySQL http://www.mysql.com/ Apache http://httpd.apache.org/