PHP/FI

PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in the fall of 1994, initially as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online resume. The first version used by others was available in early 1995 and was known as the Personal Home Page Tools. It consisted of a very simplistic parser engine that only understood a few special macros and a number of utilities such as a guestbook, a counter etc. As more functionality was required, Rasmus wrote a much larger C implementation, which was able to communicate with databases, and enabled users to develop simple dynamic Web applications. The FI came from another package Rasmus had written which interpreted html form data. He combined the Personal Home Page tools scripts with the Form Interpreter and added mSQL support and PHP/FI was born. Rasmus chose to release the source code for PHP/FI for everybody to see, so that anybody can use it, as well as fix bugs in it and improve the code.

By late 1996 PHP/FI was in use on at least 15,000 web sites around the world. By mid-1997 this number had grown to over 50,000, accounting for about 1% of the domains on the Internet. The development of PHP became a team effort. The parser was rewritten from scratch by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans and this new parser formed the basis for PHP Version 3. A lot of the utility code from PHP/FI was ported over to PHP 3 and a lot of it was completely rewritten.

PHP 3

PHP 3.0, now named PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor - a recursive acronym, was the first version that closely resembles PHP as we know it today.

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.

By the end of 1998, PHP grew to an install base of tens of thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of Web sites. At its peak, PHP 3.0 was installed on approximately 10% of the Web servers on the Internet.

PHP 3.0 was officially released in June 1998, after having spent about 9 months in public testing.

PHP 4

By the winter of 1998, shortly after PHP 3.0 was officially released, 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 constructs.

PHP now has over two hundred regular contributors working on various parts of the project. It has a massive amount of third party extension modules, supports all popular servers natively, and has inbuilt MySql and ODBC support.

PHP is being used by hundreds of thousands of developers, and several million sites report as having it installed, which accounts for over 20% of the domains on the Internet.

PHP 5

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. To get more information on this engine, see its webpage.

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