[php] What it is

[imported_danny]

What is PHP....

PHP, which stands for “Hypertext Preprocessor“, is a server-side scripting language used for creating HTML
embedded dynamic Web pages. PHP is used mainly in server-side scripting, but can be used from a command line interface or in standalone graphical applications.

PHP was written as a set of CGI binaries in the C programming language by the Danish/Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage. Rasmus Lerdorf initially created PHP to display his résumé and to collect certain data, such as how much traffic his page was receiving. Rasmus Lerdorf wrote a much larger C implementation, which was able to communicate with databases, and enabled users to develop simple dynamic Web applications. Then after Rasmus Lerdorf decide to make his code available publicly, so that anybody can use it, as well as fix bugs in it and improve the code.

PHP/FI, which stood for Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter, included some of the basic functionality of PHP as we know it today. It had Perl-like variables, automatic interpretation of form variables and HTML embedded syntax. The syntax itself was similar to that of Perl, albeit much more limited, simple, and somewhat inconsistent. In 1997 PHP/FI get improved and officially released in November as beta version.

Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski in 1997 as a complete rewrite, after they found PHP/FI 2.0 severely underpowered for developing an eCommerce application they were working on for a University project and formed the base of PHP 3. PHP 3.0 was officially released in June 1998, after having spent about 9 months in public testing.

One of the biggest strengths of PHP 3.0 was its strong extensibility features. In addition to providing end users with a solid infrastructure for lots of different databases, protocols and APIs, PHP 3.0’s extensibility features attracted dozens of developers to join in and submit new extension modules. Arguably, this was the key to PHP 3.0’s tremendous success. Other key features introduced in PHP 3.0 were the object oriented syntax support and the much more powerful and consistent language syntax.

The whole new language was released under a new name, which removed the implication of limited personal use that the PHP/FI 2.0 name held. It was named plain ‘PHP’, with the meaning being a recursive acronym - PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

Andi Gutmans and Zeev 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 support for a wide variety of third party databases and APIs, but PHP 3.0 was not designed to handle such complex applications efficiently.

The new engine, dubbed ‘Zend Engine‘ (comprised 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 construct.

PHP 5 was released in July 2004 after long development and several pre-releases. It is mainly driven by its core, the Zend Engine 2.0 with a new object model and dozens of other new features.

[Brecon]

Wow after reading all of that i now consider myself a sad low life

But nice work finding all that