What Can PHP Do?

PHP is mainly focused on three main areas

1. Server-side scripting
2. Command-line scripting
3. Writing desktop applications

Server-side scripting

• This is the main target field of PHP. 
• You need three things to use.
  1. PHP Parser
  2. A Web browser
  3. A Webserver
• You need to install the PHP and run the webserver with connected PHP Installation.
• Using a web browser, you can access PHP Output.
• The PHP page is viewing through a server.

Command-line scripting

• You can run PHP scripts without using a web browser or any server.
• These scripts are mainly used for simple text processing tasks.

Writing desktop applications

• PHP is not good for developing desktop applications with a graphical user interface.
• You can use PHP-GTK for such applications.
• It is not available in the main distribution. It is an extension to the PHP.
• PHP can be used on all major operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Unix variants, Linux, macOS.
• PHP has support from most of the web servers like Apache, IIS and many others.
• In PHP, you have freedom of choosing object-oriented programming(OOP), procedural oriented programming or mixture of them both.

Wide range of databases

• PHP Supports a wide range of databases like MySQL or connects to any database supporting the Open Database Connection standard. 

Text processing features

• PHP also has text processing features like Perl compatible regular expressions (PCRE), and many extensions and tools to parse and access XML documents.
• PHP extends the feature set adding the support for XMLWriter, XMLReader and SimpleXML.