Advantages
- Has a large community and many scripts and libraries are available on the Internet
- Runs on many platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X)
- Compatible with most of the web servers (Apache, IIS, nginx)
- It is open source, so bugs can be quickly found and fixed
- Has support for custom extensions, that can be written in C or C++ (in order to improve performance in critical areas)
Disadvantages
- It is open source, so if there are any bugs in the code, they can be used to exploit the weaknesses
- Not enough support for desktop applications
Components
- HTTP authentication
- Supports Cookies
- Supports Sessions
- Handles file uploads
- Connection handling
- Persistent Database Connections
Development tools
- Eclipse
- NetBeans
- Zend Studio
