History of PHP

PHP/FI

PHP is a server side scripting language used for making from simple to complex dynamic websites. In it's fist incarnation PHP was called PHP/FI , an acronym for Personal Homepage /Forms Interpreter and was a personal project of Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. Initially it was created as a set of Perl scripts in order to help him track visitors to his CV. As time wore on Rasmus added to his project and was able to add such functionality as database access and this helped other devotees use it to build simple dynamic websites.
In 1997 and in it's second release, the language had it's user base grow to more than 50,000. It had a syntax very similar to that of Perl, a popular scripting language of the time.

PHP 3

Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski managed to completely rewrite PHP/FI to help with their university project and in 1997 issued PHP 3.0 as a new and official release of the language.
One of the best features of PHP 3 was that it had extensibility built in and many new developers helped to add to the library of functions available to it. Along with the object oriented structure of the language, or in other words that it could be processed by using a hierarchy of classes, objects, attributes and methods, this led to the remarkable success and uptake of the language.
This new language was renamed PHP, a recursive acronym meaning; PHP Hypertext Preprocessor, which also describes it's function as a server side processor of Hypertext markup for webpages. By this time it was installed on 10% of the world's servers.

PHP 4

A further release of PHP was undertaken in late 1998, including increased support for more database flavours and a more modular way of writing which meant extra support for third party API's. PHP's driving engine, as installed on the server was to be named the 'Zend engine' after the first name of it's creators, (Zeev and Andi). PHP 4 was released in May 2000 and it supported many more web servers. It also included new features such as more secure input processing and sessions. It is estimated that PHP is now installed on 20% of the world's web servers.

PHP 5

In July 2004 the long awaited PHP 5 was released and includes many new features including many more functions and so called 'magic' methods



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