IBM says PHP most popular language for mobile applications?

[dave7135]

Am I reading this right? "PHP is the most popular scripting language for building web and mobile applications." http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/i/php/

I'm not sure if they mean "mobile web sites"; I've never heard of a mobile application being written in PHP, and I'm not sure how the code would be compiled or executed.

I do notice some of the links on that page are broken.

[zvika]

PHP runs the server side of things, meaning it will return data or complete web pages to the client, whether it is a browser, a mobile application using a browser-like window or a native mobile application which sends out HTTP requests to the PHP server.
When you build your application, you use frontend technologies which build the user interface and interaction, but the business logic and data is usually on the server side, run by PHP scripting language.
Hope this puts things in order.

[emil4700]

The Hypertext Preprocessor was developed by Zend Technologies as an open source language for server-side scripting. This language was used initially for websites until recently when it has now been adopted for the purpose of mobile app development. PHP is also used for command line scripting and to code applications. It is a programming language used in making websites, android apps and iOS apps.

PHP has been used for websites like Facebook, Yahoo, Flickr, Tumblr, Wikipedia etc. PHP is used to create e-commerce websites, creating PDFs, for creating content management systems like Drupal and WordPress.

PHP features include:

It is also easy to learn
It is very compatible with servers
It is an open source platform
It is both procedural and object-oriented.
Source - Quora