Annonymous File Extensions

Being a newb to PHP (and this forum) i'm just wondering about different file extensions, different languages and indeed whether I have made the best decision in choosing to start with PHP.

I have been looking at a range of websites and my basic question is this: why is it that the .php extension doesn't appear to be all that commonly used on more "professional" sites? Looking at some major sites e.g. Amazon, BBC (.stm), some major newspapers e.g. the Independent or timesonline.co.uk (both use a .ece extension) it appears as though PHP is little used by some of the biggest and greatest companies around. Either that or the extension is cunningly disguised?

I know this is probably of little consequence, and really it will not influence my decision to read fully into PHP, but it does make me a little curious as to why some of the larger companies on the web see fit to avoid using this language. I was always under the impression that PHP was one of the more popular languages for developing dynamic web pages, or am I missing something?

n.b. Apologies for my references, I'm aware this is predominantly an American site so few of you will be all that familiar with my references to British newspapers!

 

Facebook, FlickR, Deviantart, Yahoo uses PHP, so did many big websites. If you don't see PHP extension that doesn't mean that PHP is not being used in the project.

You can hide extensions easily by using mod rewrite or something like. and I think PHP is the best language to get started in the field of programming. I too started with PHP and I after mastering PHP, I found it easy to learn any other language.

 

I think PHP is the easiest language to start with, because it's easy to learn even for beginners, but the dark side is that it's VERY easy to make mistakes when programming with PHP, mistakes that can lead to compromising of a server.

The classic mistakes are : SQL injection, lack of verification with file upload, remote file include and local file include, and others.

So I'd say PHP can be a very good language to start with, but I'd advise to really take care when using it.

 

Many large company use PHP. All of the largest forums (including the world's largest) use PHP. The reason for this is that PHP is good to use if you want to keep your server-load low. Many of these companies, however, do hide the fact that they use PHP (could be security reasons).

Here's an example of Google's usage of PHP: http://toolbar.google.com/send/sms/index.php

You've made the right choice by choosing PHP. PHP is obviously the most popular server-side web scripting language, this means you will find lots of help and resources to guide you in learning PHP. Also, PHP is almost the only server-side web scripting language that you can make money with these days. (Jobs, selling scripts, etc)

There's plenty of IRC help channels for PHP, the largest being ##php at freenode.net with over 500 users in the channel at the same time. (chatrooms)

By the way, where does it say this is a mainly-American site? Although Americans are half of the internet, you can't help but notice that there's plenty of Indian, British and Arabic people in this forum too.

 

Lets see.....

PHP: .php A database driven programming and general Website programming.
ASP: .asp A less code similar to PHP
HTML: .htm .html A tag based system, most popular for building websites.
XHTML: .xhtml Like HTML but more advanced, meaning less tags are needed for complicated things.
CSS: .css A addon for HTMl, allows side wide chances to themes.
Java. .jc A mulitmedia Object orientated code. Mostly done for complex scripts to add to websites and games.
C, C#, C++ .c, .cp, .cpp A building blocks code, widely used in the games industry due to its cross platform. If you understand this you can understand any code.
.NET, Visual Basic. A windows only code.


There are others, like shockwave or perl, but they seem to be the main ones I've seen.