PHP, which stands for Hypertext Preprocessor, is one of the most commonly used programming languages for web development. It was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf as a personal project to track visits to his online resume. Originally, it was called “Personal Home Page Tools” and consisted of a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts written in the C programming language. These scripts were used to generate simple web pages and collect data from forms. The following year, Lerdorf released the source code for PHP and it gained popularity among web developers due to its simplicity and ease of use.

In 1997, two developers, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, rewrote the core of PHP and introduced a new architecture called the Zend Engine. This new version, called PHP 3, brought significant improvements and made PHP a more robust and scalable language. It also introduced support for databases, which was a major step forward in web development. With the release of PHP 3, PHP became a more serious and widely adopted language for building dynamic web applications.

In the early 2000s, PHP continued to evolve and gain popularity. In 2004, PHP 5 was released, which introduced object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts and improved performance. This version also included the Zend Engine 2, which was a major update and made PHP more efficient and faster. With the growing demand for dynamic and interactive websites, PHP became the go-to language for web development.

In 2008, the PHP community released PHP 5.3, which added new features such as namespaces, late static binding, and closures. These additions made PHP a more powerful and modern language, allowing developers to write more complex and sophisticated applications. The next major release, PHP 7, came out in 2015 and brought even more improvements in terms of performance and security. PHP 7 also introduced the concept of scalar type declarations, making the language more strict and less error-prone.

Today, PHP is still widely used for web development, with a market share of over 78% among server-side programming languages. It is constantly evolving and improving, with regular updates and new features being added. In recent years, PHP has also gained popularity in the world of back-end development, with frameworks like Laravel and Symfony becoming go-to choices for building complex web applications. With its long history and continuous development, PHP remains a crucial language in the world of web development.