Research Documentation 01 Php History

01 - PHP History

Who and Why PHP?

PHP was created sometime during the Fall of 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. The early, non-released versions, were used on his home page to keep track of who was looking at his online resume. He named it "Personal Home Page Tools", or "PHP Tools". In June of 1995 the source code for PHP Tools was released to the public for other developers to use. Throughout the rest of the late 90s, PHP would continue to be updated and expanded upon. By May of 1998, nearly 60,000 domains reported having headers containing PHP, indicating the host servers had it installed.

Over the next couple decades, newer versions of PHP would be released. The latest version, PHP 8, was released in the year 2020. Every update contains new features and optimizations. The arguments for why use PHP are listed below:

• PHP is an efficient language, capable of delivering the high-perfomance times demanded by today's consumers.
• PHP is free to use, and it is open source.
• PHP has extensive libraries, which offer pre-written and optimized code to run tasks smoothly and efficiently.
• PHP is flexible and adaptable. It's a top choice for many content management systems.
• PHP has robust support provided by the PHP community.
• PHP is compatible with a wide range of databases.
• PHP is also a highly scalable language, that can handle large projects effectively.

PHP Environment

In order to develop and run PHP Web pages, your computer needs to have 3 vital components installed:

• Web Server: PHP will work with almost all web server software. The most often used is Apache Server, which is available for free.
• Database: PHP will work with virtually all database software. The most commonly used is the MySQL database, which is available for free as well.
• PHP Parser: In order to process PHP script instructions, a parser must be installed to generate HTML output that can be sent to the Web Browser.

Usage of PHP on the Internet

Some statistics of PHP usage on the internet include:

• 77% of all live websites use PHP.
• PHP powers 22% of the top 10,000 sites.
• 81% of all PHP uses are still for web development.
• 25.8% of web developers prefer PHP.
• 4 countries have more than 1 million PHP-powered websites.
• There are 700,000 searches per month on Google for the term PHP.

Summary of the Documentation

PHP was conceived sometime in the Fall of 1994 by Rasmus Ledorf. Over the next couple decades, more versions would be released that expanded upon newer features and optimizations. The latest version of PHP is called PHP 8 and released in the year 2020. It is an efficient language that delivers high performance, and it is used by a majority of the live websites on the internet today. In order to run PHP you need 3 things installed that must be compatible with PHP which include web server software, database software, and a PHP parser.