PHP is a computer scripting language, originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. It has evolved to include a command line interface capability and can be used in standalone graphical applications.
While PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, the main implementation of PHP is now produced by The PHP Group and serves as the de facto standard for PHP as there is no formal specification. Released under the PHP License, the Free Software Foundation considers it to be free software.
PHP is a server-side scripting language for creating dynamic Web pages. PHP's programming syntax is very similar to that of Perl. Because of its elegant design, PHP makes it easy for anyone to learn. It is significantly easier than comparable Perl or ASP Code. Unlike other scripting languages, PHP supports the most common databases like Oracle, Sybase and MySQL. It is also possible to integrate external libraries to generate PDF documents or parsing XML PHP is an open-source language and is supported by a large groups of delvelopers. The code is downloadable from php.net.
PHP, known originally as Personal Home Pages, was first conceived in the autumn of 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. He wrote it as a way to track visitors to his online CV. The first version was released in early 1995, by which time Rasmus had found that by making the project open-source, people would fix his bugs. The first version was very straightforward and had a simple parser which recognised a few special macros and provided some of the utilities which were in common usage on homepages back then.
The parser was rewritten in mid-1995 and renamed PHP/FI version 2. The "FI" in this version stood for the Form Interpreter which Rasmus had added to PHP to cope with the growing needs of webpages. mSQL support was also added at this time. PHP/FI underwent massive growth, and other people started to contribute code to it regularly.
In mid-1997 Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the main parser, and PHP shifted from being Rasmus' own to a more group orientated project. This formed the basis for PHP3, now named PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor - a recursive acronym.
Bookmarks