A Glance at the History of PHP

PHP is worldwide adopted by web developers for its simplicity and capability to fetch stable, faster, and economical results. For more than a decade, PHP has been serving as a trusted scripting language to simplify & streamline variety of web exercises, which would otherwise be difficult to manage. In this blog, we are going to discuss in brief the transformations that PHP has seen in its evolution period.

• Created by Rasmus Lerdorf, a Danish/Greenlandic programmer who wrote the original Common Gateway Interface component, PHP has undergone radical changes since its first official launch in 1995 to the latest stable release PHP 5.3.3 (launched on 22 July 2010). PHP initially comprised a set of Perl scripts, whose use was limited to maintain Lerdorf's personal homepage. But later the need of more functionality was sought which necessitated Rasmus to write a larger C implementation with which efficient communication with databases can be established.
• The further web development of PHP was taken over by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans (the two developers from Technion IIT) in the year 1997, who rewrote the parser and built the base of PHP3. Then came PHP3.0, which had globally famed for its robust extensibility features. This version was supporting different kinds of protocols, databases, and APIs; thus tempted developers to be a part of PHP for adding new extension modules. PHP 3.0 was at the public testing for almost 9 months and then it was officially launched in June 1998.
• Just after the release of PHP3.0, the two developers i.e. Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans have once more started the rework on PHP's core, with the aim to maximize its performance for intricate applications. However, they primarily focused on the modularity of PHP's code base. With the launch of PHP 4, they have re-proven the worth of this revolutionary scripting language. Now, as a result of continuous improvements, PHP has reached to its fifth version and serving the diverse needs of developers with much efficacy and comparatively serving their more complex functions.

Today, PHP's contribution in World Wide Web can be measured with its use which accounts for more than 20% of the hosted domains.