Chapter 16. Working with Dynamic Documents, Images, and Movies

The main idea of every scripting language optimized for the Web is to generate dynamic documents. Dynamic documents are not just text or HTML documents; it is also possible to generate images, movies, or any other kind of document.

In the beginning, people built static Web sites. With the arrival of interfaces such as the CGI interface, people started developing dynamic Web sites. Building a dynamic Web site also means that in some situations it might be useful to generate dynamic images or movies.

PHP has been designed to satisfy all these demands and you will learn about dynamic documents generated by PHP and PostgreSQL in this chapter.