Web Standards Programmer's Reference: HTML, CSS, JavaScript®, Perl, Python®, and PHP

29.1. The History of PHP

PHP was originally conceived and created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. Dubbed Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter (or PHP/FI), the original scripting language was created to track how many times a particular page was accessed. As the needs for the scripting system grew, so did the language. By 1997, the small, personal scripting project was used by thousands of people worldwide.

In 1997 Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski did a complete rewrite of PHP/FI when they found it underpowered for a particular task. This new version included powerful extensibility features that allowed it to interface with many other programs, applications, data structures, and APIs. Version 3.0 was officially released in June 1998. It is estimated that PHP 3.0 was installed on 10 percent of Internet servers at its peak.

Version 4.0 with the Zend engine—a notable performance enhancement named for its creators, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans—was released in May 2000.

PHP is now in version 5 (released in July 2004) and is a much more powerful language, but it provides the same extensibility features.

Upon the release of version 3.0 the decision was made to keep the PHP part of the name but drop the FI. The meaning of PHP was also changed to a recursive acronym: PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

PHP provides the following advantages as a scripting language:

• A familiar Perl-like structure and syntax

• Robust HTTP-handling capabilities

• The capability to coexist with raw HTML in the same file

• Modules ...