History of PHP Programming

In this tutorial, we learn about the History of PHP. PHP or Hypertext Preprocessor is a highly popular server-side scripting language. It is very flexible and has a lot of innovative features. It is the fastest resource available for creating database-enabled dynamic websites. All the features and updates of PHP are available free of cost.

And after writing the First Program in PHP we have to learn about the History of PHP.

History of PHP

The PHP code is well organized and can be easily embedded into HTML code. It works on all major operating systems like Linux, Windows, Unix and Mac OS, and it supports main web and enterprise servers like Apache, Netscape, Microsoft IIS, etc. Moreover, it is easier to troubleshoot problems in PHP when compared to other languages.

For a web developer, designing a complex, yet attractive website in a short span of time is a big challenge. This is where PHP frameworks prove to be useful. Frameworks can be used to develop websites of all sizes and complexity. The most popular ones include WordPress, Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, and Phalcon, to name a few.

PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 and was publicly released in June 1995. Back then, it was the abbreviated form of Personal Home Page tools. After two years, in 1997, it entered the public domain as PHP/F1 2.0. A year later, two programmers, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, rewrote the base of the original version and launched PHP 3.

PHP 4, which came out in 2000, incorporated a scripting engine named Zend Engine that was designed by Suraski and Gutmans. Three more major versions with some sub-versions were launched in the later years with the latest version 7.0 released in 2015.

Two decades after its inception, in the History of PHP has registered a phenomenal growth and is still going strong. Today, it controls over 80% of all the websites on the globe. This includes majors like Facebook, Wikipedia, and WordPress among others.

PHP 3 – Hits the Big Time

History of PHP

PHP 3.0 was the first version that closely resembles PHP as it exists today. Finding PHP/FI 2.0 still inefficient and lacking features they needed to power an eCommerce application they were developing for a university project, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski of Tel Aviv, Israel, began yet another complete rewrite of the underlying parser in 1997. Approaching Rasmus online, they discussed various aspects of the current implementation and their redevelopment of PHP. In an effort to improve the engine and start building upon PHP/FI’s existing user base, Andi, Rasmus, and Zeev decided to collaborate in the development of a new, independent programming language. This entirely 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 renamed simply ‘PHP’, with the meaning becoming a recursive acronym – PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

PHP 4 – Optimization, Scalability and More

History of PHP

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 the 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.

PHP 5 – Object Orientation, Error Handling, and XML

History of PHP

PHP 5 was released in July 2004 after the 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.

In the History of PHP development team includes dozens of developers, as well as dozens of others working on PHP-related and supporting projects, such as PEAR, PECL, and documentation, and an underlying network infrastructure of well over one-hundred individual web servers on six of the seven continents of the world. Though only an estimate based on statistics from previous years, it is safe to presume PHP is now installed on tens or even perhaps hundreds of millions of domains around the world.

PHP 7 – Makes Powering the web a whole lot better

History of PHP

Introducing PHP 7 – a revolution in the way we deliver applications that power everything from websites and mobile to enterprises and the cloud. This is the most important change for PHP since the release of PHP 5 in 2004, bringing explosive performance improvements, drastically reduced memory consumption, and a host of brand-new language features to make your apps soar.

Thanks to the new Zend Engine 3.0, your apps see up to 2x faster performance and 50% better memory consumption than PHP 5.6, allowing you to serve more concurrent users without adding any hardware. Designed and refactored for today’s workloads, PHP 7 is the ultimate choice for web developers today.

PHP 7 is a major release of PHP programming language and is touted to be a revolution in the way web applications can be developed and delivered for mobile to enterprises and the cloud. This release is considered to be the most important change for PHP after the release of PHP 5 in 2004.

New Features

There are dozens of features added to PHP 7, the most significant ones are mentioned below −

Improved performance − Having PHPNG code merged in PHP7, it is twice as fast as PHP 5.
Lower Memory Consumption − Optimized PHP 7 utilizes the lesser resource.
Scalar type declarations − Now parameter and return types can be enforced.
Consistent 64-bit support − Consistent support for 64-bit architecture machines.
Improved Exception hierarchy − Exception hierarchy is improved.
Many fatal errors converted to Exceptions − Range of exceptions is increased covering many fatal errors converted as exceptions.
Secure random number generator − Addition of new secure random number generator API.
Deprecated APIs and extensions removed − Various old and unsupported APIs and extensions are removed from the latest version.
The null coalescing operator (??) − New null coalescing operator added.
Return and Scalar Type Declarations − Support for return type and parameter type added.
Anonymous Classes − Support for anonymous added.
Zero cost asserts − Support for zero cost asserts added.

PHP 7 uses new Zend Engine 3.0 to the History of PHP improve application performance almost twice and 50% better memory consumption than PHP 5.6. It allows serving more concurrent users without requiring any additional hardware. PHP 7 is designed and refactored considering today’s workloads.

How Popular is PHP ?

A quick review of some statistics gives a very clear indication of the phenomenally widespread use of PHP. A company called Netcraft specializes in recording data about the types of web servers and web server modules that are used on the internet. As of April 2007, Netcraft reported that PHP was used on over 20,000,000 plus distinct web domains.

A web survey by SecuritySpace also lists PHP as the most widely deployed Apache module. It is safe to say that PHP has taken the internet by storm. This is the All History of PHP.