PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. It was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994; the PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, but it now stands for the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP code is interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module which generates the resulting web page. It also has evolved to include a command-line interface capability and can be used in standalone graphical applications. PHP can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge.
PHP is used mainly in server-side scripting, but can be used from a command line interface or in standalone graphical applications. It has also evolved to include a processing model similar to that of other web application frameworks. The most recent version of PHP is 7.4.0, which was released on November 28th, 2019. PHP development began in 1994 when Rasmus Lerdorf wrote several Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs in C, which he used to maintain his personal homepage. He extended them to add the ability to work with web forms and to communicate with databases, and called this implementation “Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter” or PHP/FI.
PHP/FI could be used to build simple, dynamic web applications. To accelerate bug reporting and improve the code, Lerdorf initially announced the launch of PHP/FI as “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0” in June 1995 on the Usenet discussion group comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi. This release already had the basic functionality that PHP has today. This included Perl-like variables, form handling, and the ability to embed HTML. The syntax resembled that of Perl but was simpler, more limited and less consistent.
In late 1997, PHP development entered the hands of the Open Source community. Several developers, known as the PHP Group, worked on improving the PHP/FI 2.0 codebase, producing the Zend engine in 1999. The official launch of PHP 3.0 was announced in June 1998. It was the first widely-used version of PHP and contained a significantly re-written Zend engine.
Since then, PHP has been under active development. The most recent versions, PHP 4 and 5, include a new object model and more powerful features such as improved support for databases, better performance, improved security and a larger library of built-in functions. PHP 7 was released in 2015 and offers improved performance and new features such as scalar type declarations, return type declarations, the Spaceship operator, and the null coalescing operator.
PHP is a programming language which has been around for many years, and has been evolving and changing ever since. Over the years, PHP has been improved and enhanced, making it a much more powerful and versatile language than it was in the past. One of the earliest changes that was made to PHP was the inclusion of a database component, which allowed developers to build applications and websites that could interact with a database. This allowed PHP to become a full-fledged web development language, and is one of the features that has made it so popular over the years. In recent years, PHP has also become much more object-oriented, allowing developers to create code that is easier to maintain and debug. Additionally, PHP has seen the introduction of many new features, such as namespaces, closures, and the ability to use modern web technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. These changes have allowed PHP to become much more powerful and versatile, allowing developers to build applications and websites that are more complex and powerful than ever before.
