What are the advantages and disadvantages of using PHP?
Advantages:PHP is available for free (this is often the most desirable aspect for hobbyists) PHP is often available as the default for many hobbyist web hosting services.PHP is often packaged or offered with MySQL, a free database system, and Apache, a free HTTP DaemonPHP has a wealth of online information available It's available with documentation in many languagesThere are many support groups, forums, and teams supporting PHPPHP is Open Source There are a large number of add-ons and modules, such as for image libraries, networking over HTTP (and other protocols), etc.People are always developing and contributing modules, add-ons, and offering suggestions for improvement, usually also for free.PHP is easy to use PHP is an interpreted language, so there is no need to compile an executable binary in order to run your scriptIt is loosely typed, which makes basic scripts much faster to develop with less need for design planningVariables can be instantiated without a type declaration, making variables more flexiblePHP has a lot in common with many other languages, such as Java, PERL, and BASIC, so that programmers from other backgrounds can still find PHP usefulPHP is flexible. Use of naming conventions, objects/OOP, etc are completely optionalIt runs on many different operating systemsIt can be optimized, for performance closer to that of other established, compiled languagesDisadvantages:Out of the box, PHP tends to execute more slowly than assembly, C, and other compiled languages for most applicationsPHP is loosely typed. For developers of all skill levels, this allows more room for unexpected behavior due to programmer error that many other languages might not permit (of course, few if any languages can protect from developer error!).Its flexibility means that there are many ways to do one thing, and many opportunities for ambiguous handling of functions and classes due to legacy support or PHP development history (or programmer error).It is free, but that usually means that there is no "official" customer support available (there may be a paid premium service); you often have to rely on the Open Source PHP Community to answer questions or suggest how to fix problems.