There are a number of great online GIS ( Geographic Information System ) solutions out there, ranging from Mappoint to Mapquest to some cool PHP projects. However, it is still nice to be able to be able plot you own data and put some basic mapping utilities on your site with a minimum of fuss and bother. Over the next couple of articles I will hopefully be able to give you a few pointers on how to create you own basic GIS system for free. I do not claim to be a GIS expert, and there may be better ways to do things, but hopefully these articles will give you a start in the right direction.
PHP (which originally stood for Personal Home Page) was first written by Rasmus Lerdorf as a simple set of Perl scripts to track users of his Web pages. He soon had enquiries from other people and rewrote it as a scripting engine. He also added support for forms, thus forming PHP/FI. As its popularity grew, a core group of developers created an API for it and turned it into PHP3. By now PHP was being used in situations which were never envisaged, and so a complete rewrite of the script parser was undertaken (the Zend engine), creating PHP4, which was much faster than PHP3. PHP now stood for PHP Hypertext Processor, and was ready for the big time...
If you came late to the PHP Party, don't worry--there's plenty of reasons to celebrate. PHP is an Open Source server-side scripting language for creating dynamic web content, in place on some 1.5 million Web sites worldwide--and growing. There's a new version of PHP out, version 4.0. I just got around to downloading and giving it a whirl.
PHP is the market-leading dynamic language for producing modern Web applications. Its popularity for building content management and e-commerce systems stems from its portability, ease of use, and wide support for accessing database and enterprise data sources. IBM and Zend Technologies have partnered to deliver Zend Core for IBM?, which is the industry's only certified and fully supported PHP development and production environment for IBM data servers.
PHP is an open source programming language that is widely popular on the web. However because PHP so popular in shared hosting environments, many people have an impression that PHP is only for small scale web-sites. This is patently untrue, and PHP is in use in many large scale web sites such as Yahoo and Lufthansa Online Ticketing for the creation of large web applications such as IMP. This article is an attempt to readdress the balance and show how PHP is used in the enterprise
Joining mailing list will entitle you
to receive occasional emails informing you of news and
updates to the site and any special offers that may be
of interest to you.