What is PHP and its History

PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is a server-side language to develop dynamic web pages. The syntax and the built-in functions are similar to C++ language ones

PHP was born in 1994, written by Rasmus Lerdorf. Early non-released versions were used on his home page to keep track of who was looking at his online resume. The first version used by others was available sometime 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 that were in common use on home pages back then including a guestbook and counter.

The parser was rewritten in 1995 and named PHP/FI Version 2. 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. PHP/FI grew at an amazing pace and people started contributing code to it.

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.

The latest version (PHP 4) uses the Zend Scripting Engine version 1.0 to accelerate scripts execution, supports a lot of third-party libraries and extensions, and can be run as a native server module with all of the popular web servers.

What It Can Do

What distinguishes PHP from something like JavaScript, is that the code is executed on the server. (For this reason, it is called server-side code)

The best things in using PHP are that it is extremely simple for a newcomer, but offers many advanced features for a professional programmer.

With PHP you are not limited to output HTML. PHP’s abilities include outputting images, PDF files, and even Flash movies (using libswf and Ming) generated on the fly. You can also output any text, such as XHTML and any other XML file. PHP can automatically generate these files, and save them in the file system, instead of printing it out, forming a server-side cache for dynamic content.

One of the strongest and most significant features in PHP is its support for a wide range of databases, such as MySQL, PgSQL, FilePro, ODBC, mSQL and many others.

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