PHP: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 22:49, 20 June 2005

Revision as of 22:49, 20 June 2005

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PHP was originally designed as a small set of Perl scripts, followed by a rewritten set of CGI binaries written in C by the [[Denmark|Danish]]-[[Canada|Canadian]] [[programmer]] [[Rasmus Lerdorf]] in [[1994]] to display his résumé and collect some data, such as how many hits it was generating. Others first used "'''P'''ersonal '''H'''ome '''P'''age Tools" in [[1995]], when Lerdorf had combined it with his own Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI. [[Zeev Suraski]] and [[Andi Gutmans]], two [[Israel]]i developers of the [[Technion|Technion - Israel Institute of Technology]], rewrote the parser in [[1997]] and formed the base of PHP 3. They also changed the name to its current recursive form. After months in [[development stage|beta]], the development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in [[November]] [[1997]]. Public testing of PHP 3 began immediately 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]] ([http://www.zend.com/zend/zend-engine-summary.php a page at www.zend.com] states that PHP 3 was powered by Zend Engine 0.5). They also founded [[Zend Technologies]] in [[Ramat Gan]], [[Israel]] which has since overseen the PHP advances. In May [[2000]], PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. On [[July 13]], [[2004]], PHP 5 was released, powered by Zend Engine II (formerly known as Zend Engine 2).

==Popularity==

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PHP is currently one of the most [[popularity|popular]] [[server-side scripting]] systems on the Web. It has been widely adopted since the release of version 4.

One major part of PHP which has helped it become popular is that it is a very loose language; in particular, it is [[dynamic typing|dynamically typed]]. That is, the rules aren't as strict with variables&mdash;they don't have to be declared and they can hold any type of object. Further, unlike many other languages (like [[C plus plus|C++]] and Java), arrays are able to hold objects of varying types, including other arrays.

According to [[Netcraft]]'s April [[2002]] survey, PHP is now the most deployed server-side scripting language, running on around 9 million of the 37 million domains in their survey. This is confirmed by PHP's own figures, which show PHP usage (measured on a per-___domain basis) growing at around 5% per month. In May 2003, almost 13 million domains were using PHP, based on the same source.[http://www.php.net/usage.php]

Due to PHP's popularity, a new breed of programmer has emerged&mdash;one who is familiar only with PHP, which in turn forced open the door toward a [[command line interface]] for PHP, along with support for GUI library such as [[GTK|GTK+]] and text mode libraries like [[Ncurses]] and Newt. This is a major step for PHP, because it represents its adoption as a genuine programming language (that is, running autonomously on a stand-alone machine, as opposed to its original purpose of serving web pages to client machines from a server).

Many PHP programmers have reported having had trouble trying to learn other languages in the past and ultimately giving up after each attempt until attempting to learn PHP. The ease of programming in PHP has made it so these programmers are able to learn the basics of programming and are then able to continue on to other languages such as C/C++ or Perl/Python/Java and then finding themselves back programming in PHP for its speed of development in comparison to other languages.

==Code example==