Professional PHP Programming

From the Book: Over the past few years, the Internet has gone from the preserve of academics to the cutting edge of business. A large part of this has been driven by the growth of the Web, with its graphical browsers and high media profile. The change from static HTML pages to dynamic, user interactive presentations has been achieved largely through the introduction of scripting technologies. Working with the usual markup language of a web page, scripting languages enable clients to demand specific information from their servers, and their servers, in turn, to receive important user input in order to process and display data on demand. In the forefront of this advancement has been the open source community, dedicated to providing web-based solutions purely for the love of the technology itself. Open source is not only about free software (though not everything is free anyway), but it is about, as the name suggests, being open about the source of the code. Having free access to the source means that authors are forced to keep to standards. If these are not maintained, the deviation is labeled a bug, and if the author doesn't fix it, someone else will. Large numbers of independent programmers being able to understand what a program does, and ensuring that standards are maintained, prevents the author from being able to exploit the user, as happens in the commercial software world.