PHP is a general-purpose scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages.  For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document. It also has evolved to include a command-line interface capability and can be used in standalone graphical applications.  PHP can be deployed on most web servers and as a standalone interpreter, on almost every operating system and platform free of charge.  A competitor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) server-side script engine and similar languages, PHP is installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers.