PHP, standing for Personal Home Page, began as a set of Common Gateway Interface binaries written in the C programming language in 1994 by the Danish / Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf . Lerdorf initially created these Personal Home Page Tools to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage . The tools were originally created to perform tasks such as displaying his résumé and recording how much traffic his page was receiving. [3] He combined these binaries with his Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI, which had more functionality. It included a larger C implementation which could communicate with databases and helped build simple, dynamic web applications . He released PHP publicly on June 8 , 1995 to speed up the finding of bugs and improving the code. [8] This release was named PHP version 2, and already had basic functionality that PHP has today. This includes Perl-like variables, form handling, and the ability to embed HTML. The syntax was similar to Perl but was more limited, simpler, and less consistent. [3]
Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans , two Israeli developers at the Technion IIT , rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor . [3] The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Afterwards, public testing of PHP 3 began, and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP's core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999. [9] They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan , Israel, which manages the development of PHP. [3]
On May 22 , 2000 , PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. [3] On July 13 , 2004 , PHP 5 was released and is powered by the new Zend Engine II. [3] PHP 5 included new features such as improved support for object-oriented programming , the PHP Data Objects extension (which defines a lightweight and consistent interface for accessing databases), and numerous performance enhancements. [10] The most recent update released by The PHP Group is for the older PHP version 4 code branch. As of January 2008, this branch is up to version 4.4.8. PHP 4 will be supported by security updates until August 8 , 2008 . [11]
PHP 5 is the only stable version still being developed.
Late static binding
has been missing from PHP and will be added in version 5.3.
[12]
[13]
Development on PHP 4 ceased at the end of 2007, except for the critical security updates for PHP 4 already mentioned.
[14]
[11]
PHP 6 is now under development and major changes include the removal of
register_globals
[15]
,
magic quotes
, and
safe mode
.
[11]
[16]
PHP does not have complete native support for
Unicode
or multibyte strings;
[17]
unicode support will be added in PHP 6.
[18]
Many high profile open source projects ceased to support PHP 4 in new code as of
February 5
,
2008
, due to the GoPHP5 initiative, provided by a consortium of PHP developers promoting the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5.
[19]
[20]
