Rasmus Lerdorf invented PHP in 1994 for personal use and released the first version in 1995 under the name Personal Homepage. PHP is an open-source, server-side scripting language that is embedded in HTML code to create dynamic web pages. PHP scripts are commonly used for server-side scripting, command line scripting, and writing desktop applications. PHP code is written using tags like <?php ?> and uses semicolons (;) to terminate statements.