22 December 2022
History of PHP: How it all started?
PHP is one of the most popular forms of web development language. The reasons for its popularity are many. These include the features this open script language offers help to create dynamic websites which are robust and easier to handle. Thus we have mega Social media websites like Facebook using this for web development. Thus PHP as a web development language offers great scope to those who work on it. As a PHP developer you have unlimited scope for career development. However let us first understand the history of PHP development.
PHP development: The initial and beginning years
PHP as known today is actually the successor of a product called PHP/Fl. It was first created by "Rasmus Lerdorf", in the year 1994. It was first started as a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries written in the C programming language. Rasmus Lerdorf first developed this to track visits on his online resume. He named this these suite of scripts as "Personal Home Page Tools". With the passage of time more functionality of this was desired. This is why Rasmus rewrote PHP Tools,which produced a much larger and richer implementation. The newly developed model thereafter became capable of database interaction. These could provide a framework which could be used to develop some simple, dynamic web applications like guest books.
It in June 1995 that Ramsus released the source code for PHP tools to the public. This allowed developers to use it. This also encouraged developers to improve upon it and also provide to fix bugs in the code. In April 1996 the second generation implementation began.
This helped PHP to truly evolve from suite of tools to a programming language in its own right. This included built-in support for DBM, mSQL, and Postgres95 databases, cookies, user-defined function support and a whole lot more. In the year 1997 PHP/FI was given a version 2.0 status.
PHP 3 was released in 1998 and became the first widely used version. Following other versions PHP 5 was released in July 2004 with the updated Zend Engine 2.0. The latest PHP 7.1 version is in use at present.
In June 2011, the PHP group had implemented a timeline for the release of new versions of PHP. Under this system one release is to happen every month. Once a year a minor release should occur which is to include new features.
