How Did PHP Evolve?

How Did PHP Evolve? The first version of PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 as a set of Web

publishing macros. These were released as the Personal Home Page Tools and later

rewritten and extended to include a package called the Form Interpreter (PHP/FI).

From a user's perspective, PHP/FI was already an attractive proposition, and its

popularity grew steadily. It also began to attract interest from the developer

community. By 1997, a team of programmers was working on the project.

The next release

—

PHP3

—

was born out of this collaborative effort. PHP3 was an

effective rewrite of PHP, with an entirely new parser created by Zeev Suraski and

Andi Gutmans, as well as differences in syntax and new features. This release

established PHP as one of the most exciting server scripting languages available,

and the growth in usage was enormous.

PHP's support for Apache and MySQL further secured its popularity. Apache is now

the most-used Web server in the world, and PHP3 can be compiled as an Apache

module. MySQL is a powerful free SQL database, and PHP provides a comprehensive

set of functions for working with it. The combination of Apache, MySQL, and PHP is

all but unbeatable.

That isn't to say that PHP is not designed to work in other environments and with

other tools. In fact, PHP supports a bewildering array of databases and servers.

The rise in popularity of PHP has coincided with a change of approach in Web

publishing. In the mid-1990s it was normal to build sites, even relatively large sites,

with hundreds of individual hard-coded HTML pages. Increasingly, though, site

publishers are harnessing the power of databases to manage their content more

effectively and to personalize their sites according to individual user preferences.

The use of databases to store content, and of a scripting language to retrieve this

data, will become further necessary as data is sent from a single source to multiple

environments, including mobile phones and PDAs, digital television, and broadband

Internet environments.

In this context, it is not surprising that a tool of PHP's sophistication and flexibility is

becoming so popular.