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PHP has come a long way in the last few years. Growing to be one of the most prominent languages powering the Web was not an easy task. Those of you interested in briefly seeing how PHP grew out to what it is today, read on. Old PHP releases can be found at the
» PHP Museum.
History of PHP
PHP/FI
PHP succeeds an older product, named PHP/FI. PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online resume. He named this set of scripts 'Personal Home Page Tools'. As more functionality was required, Rasmus wrote a much larger C implementation, which was able to communicate with databases, and enabled users to develop simple dynamic Web applications. Rasmus chose to
» release the source code for PHP/FI for everybody to see, so that anybody can use it, as well as fix bugs in it and improve the code.
PHP/FI, which stood for Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter, included some of the basic functionality of PHP as we know it today. It had Perl-like variables, automatic interpretation of form variables and HTML embedded syntax. The syntax itself was similar to that of Perl, albeit much more limited, simple, and somewhat inconsistent.
By 1997, PHP/FI 2.0, the second write-up of the C implementation, had a cult of several thousand users around the world (estimated), with approximately 50,000 domains reporting as having it installed, accounting for about 1% of the domains on the Internet. While there were several people contributing bits of code to this project, it was still at large a one-man project.
PHP/FI 2.0 was officially released only in November 1997, after spending most of its life in beta releases. It was shortly afterwards succeeded by the first alphas of PHP 3.0.
PHP 3
PHP 3.0 was the first version that closely resembles PHP as we know it today. It was created by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski in 1997 as a complete rewrite, after they found PHP/FI 2.0 severely underpowered for developing an eCommerce application they were working on for a University project. In an effort to cooperate and start building upon PHP/FI's existing user-base, Andi, Rasmus and Zeev decided to cooperate and announce PHP 3.0 as the official successor of PHP/FI 2.0, and development of PHP/FI 2.0 was mostly halted.
One of the biggest strengths of PHP 3.0 was its strong extensibility features. In addition to providing end users with a solid infrastructure for lots of different databases, protocols and APIs, PHP 3.0's extensibility features attracted dozens of developers to join in and submit new extension modules. Arguably, this was the key to PHP 3.0's tremendous success. Other key features introduced in PHP 3.0 were the object oriented syntax support and the much more powerful and consistent language syntax.
The whole new language was released under a new name, that removed the implication of limited personal use that the PHP/FI 2.0 name held. It was named plain 'PHP', with the meaning being a recursive acronym - PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
By the end of 1998, PHP grew to an install base of tens of thousands of users (estimated) and hundreds of thousands of Web sites reporting it installed. At its peak, PHP 3.0 was installed on approximately 10% of the Web servers on the Internet.
PHP 3.0 was officially released in June 1998, after having spent about 9 months in public testing.
PHP 4
By the winter of 1998, shortly after PHP 3.0 was officially released, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski had begun working on a rewrite of PHP's core. The design goals were to improve performance of complex applications, and improve the modularity of PHP's code base. Such applications were made possible by PHP 3.0's new features and support for a wide variety of third party databases and APIs, but PHP 3.0 was not designed to handle such complex applications efficiently.
The new engine, dubbed 'Zend Engine' (comprised of their first names, Zeev and Andi), met these design goals successfully, and was first introduced in mid 1999. PHP 4.0, based on this engine, and coupled with a wide range of additional new features, was officially released in May 2000, almost two years after its predecessor, PHP 3.0. In addition to the highly improved performance of this version, PHP 4.0 included other key features such as support for many more Web servers, HTTP sessions, output buffering, more secure ways of handling user input and several new language constructs.
Today, PHP is being used by hundreds of thousands of developers (estimated), and several million sites report as having it installed, which accounts for over 20% of the domains on the Internet.
PHP's development team includes dozens of developers, as well as dozens others working on PHP-related projects such as PEAR and the documentation project.
PHP 5
PHP 5 was released in July 2004 after long development and several pre-releases. It is mainly driven by its core, the Zend Engine 2.0 with a new object model and dozens of other new features.
The History of PHP
PHP is an "HTML-embedded scripting language" primarily used for dynamic Web applications. The first part of this definition means that PHP code can be interspersed with HTML, making it simple to generate dynamic pieces of Web pages on the fly. As a scripting language, PHP code requires the presence of the PHP processor. PHP code is normally run in
plain-text scripts that will only run on PHP-enabled computers (conversely programming languages can create standalone binary executable files, a.k.a. programs). PHP takes most of its syntax from C, Java, and Perl. It is an open source technology and runs on most operating systems and with most Web servers.
PHP was written in the C programming language by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 for use in monitoring his online resume and related personal information. For this reason, PHP originally stood for "Personal Home Page". Lerdorf combined PHP with his own Form Interpreter, releasing the combination publicly as PHP/FI (generally referred to as PHP 2.0) on June 8, 1995.
Two programmers, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, rebuilt PHP's core, releasing the updated result as PHP/FI 2 in 1997. The acronym was formally changed to PHP: HyperText Preprocessor, at this time. (This is an example of a recursive acronym: where the acronym itself is in its own definition.) In 1998, PHP 3 was released, which was the first widely used version.
PHP 4 was released in May 2000, with a new core, known as the Zend Engine 1.0. PHP 4 featured improved speed and reliability over PHP 3. In terms of features, PHP 4 added references, the
Boolean type, COM support on Windows,
output buffering, many new
array functions, expanded
object-oriented programming, inclusion of the
PCRE library, and more. Maintenance releases of PHP 4 are still available, primarily for security updates.
PHP 5 was released in July 2004, with the updated Zend Engine 2.0. Among the many new features in PHP 5 are:
and much, much more.
PHP 6 has been in development since October of 2006. The most significant change will be native support for Unicode. Unpopular, deprecated features such as Magic Quotes,
register_globals, safe_mode, and the HTTP_*_VARS variables will disappear in PHP 6.
Although PHP is still primarily used for server-side generation of Web pages, it can also be used to perform
command-line scripting or to create graphical applications with the help of GTK+.
[[We should add some discussion of the history of NuSphere and PhpED here but I couldn't find anything that specific on your site.]]
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