The History of PHP

The History of PHP

PHP is a server­side scripting programming language that was created by a man named Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994.

Originally, the acronym PHP stood for​ Personal Home Page​ , but it has changed to now stand for ​ PHP, Hypertext PreProcessor​ . Lerdorf used this language to develop and maintain his personal website. PHP could only be used to build simple, dynamic web applications. In fact, Rasmus Lerdorf had no intention of writing an entire new programming language:

“I don’t know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language. I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.” ­ Rasmus Lerdorf

Little did he know, that PHP would become one of the most used programming languages on the web.

PHP 3 Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski from Tel Aviv, Israel approached Lerdorf with an effort to improve the language, and continue building on top of the existing code. They collaborated and developed the new language that was installed on 10% of the web by 1998. Some of the key features of PHP 3 were: object­oriented programming support, interface for multiple databases, protocols, and API’s, and a powerful language syntax.

PHP 4 PHP 4 was released in May of 2000. The goals of this redesign was to improve performance on complex platforms, and upgrade the modularity of it’s code base. Along with accomplishing these goals, the newest version of PHP had support for many more web servers, output buffering, and higher security for handling user input.

PHP 5 After many years, PHP 5 was finally released in July of 2004. Some of the new features included improved support for object­oriented programming and a PHP data objects extension, along with a handful of performance improvements. At this point, the PHP development team included over a dozen developers, and was equipped on millions and millions of domains around the globe.

PHP 6 PHP started to receive mixed reviews because of the fact that it lacked native unicode, so in 2005, Andrei Zmievski was admitted to bring this to the table of PHP. Since this would bring ​ so​ many changes to the language, it was prepared to be released as a whole new version of the language. There were numerous project delays, the project eventually got abandoned. Release 5.4 of PHP was set out (with features that were non­unicode). Developers were first planning on developing a new plan for release 6; but until 2014 nothing was constructed.

PHP 7 From 2014­2015 PHP 7 was being developed, that included major changes to the popular programming language. This release brought a ​ whole new opportunity​ to the table. Here are only a few of the new changes that were made:

● Performance of the foreach statement became more predictable ● The syntax for variable dereferencing became more dependable and thorough ● Left & right shift operators were altered to operate more consistently ● Support for legacy PHP 4­style constructor methods as well as ASP­style PHP code delimiters was eliminated. ● A considerable amount of unmaintained extensions and SAIP’s were eliminated from the core of PHP

PHP is one of the most used server­side programming languages around. ​ 81.2%​ of websites (whose server­side scripting language is know) uses PHP, and there are approximately 5 million PHP programmers worldwide.

About The Author : This Article is written by Codal’s Writer. ​ Codal​ is a UX design and development agency with a focus on blending an Agile process with the latest technologies. Based in the heart of Chicago, we have a knack for bringing out the best in every brand that we work with, worldwide. Our clientele has ranged from small business to enterprise, but our philosophy has always remained the same: to empower brand visibility and deliver the most elegant web and mobile solutions possible.

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