The Evolution Of The PHP Scripting Language

PHP is the highly evolved offspring of PHP/FI that was originally created by a programmer named Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking hits to his online resume. Out of necessity, Lerdorf wrote a much larger C implementation, which was able to also communicate with databases, and enabled users to develop simple dynamic Web applications. PHP/FI, which stood for Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter, included some of the basic functionality of PHP as we know it today. Lerdorf chose to post the source code of PHP/FI for everybody to see, so that anybody could use it, as well as help him fix bugs in it and improve the code. While there were several people contributing bits of code to this project by 1997, it remained largely a one-man project until the development of PHP 3.0.

Created by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski in 1997 as a complete rewrite, PHP 3.0 was the first version that closely resembles PHP as we know it today., Gutmans and Suraski decided to solicit Lerdorf’s cooperation in order to more easily build upon PHP/FI’s existing user-base. Lerdorf agreed and together they announced PHP 3.0 as the official successor to PHP/FI 2.0.
The new language was released in June of 1998 as simply “PHP” (acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) to eliminate the impression given by the name “PHP/FI” (acronym for Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter) that it was for limited personal use.

Perhaps the key to PHP 3.0’s tremendous success was its capability for being extended. Open-source PHP 3.0 attracted dozens of developers to join in and submit new extension modules. In addition to providing end users with a solid infrastructure for many different databases and protocols, other key features introduced in PHP 3.0 were the object oriented syntax support and the much more powerful and consistent language syntax.

Shortly after PHP 3.0 was officially released, Gutmans and Suraski had begun working on a rewrite of PHP’s core. The design goals were to improve 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 its support for a wide variety of third party databases and API’s (Application Program Interfaces), but PHP 3.0 was not designed to handle complex applications very efficiently.

The new engine, dubbed ‘Zend Engine’ (a combination of their first names, Zeev and Andi), met these design goals successfully, and was first introduced in mid 1999. PHP 4.0, based on this engine, and coupled with a wide range of additional new features, was officially released in May 2000, almost two years after its predecessor, PHP 3.0. In addition to the highly improved performance of this version, PHP 4.0 included other key features such as support for many more Web servers, HTTP sessions, output buffering, more secure ways of handling user input and several new language constructs. PHP 4.0 is currently the latest released version of PHP although PHP 5.0 is in testing.

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