PHP

What is PHP?

PHP is a scripting language used to create dynamic web pages.It is an interpreted language that is executed on server side.PHP can be embedded in HTML pages and usually runs on web servers.

It can be deployed on any web server ,OS such as windows,UNIX,Linux and supported various database ,such as MySQL,Oracle,Informx ,and sybase.A php code is execute through the PHP run time and used to create dynamic webpage.PHP file has extension  .php,php3,orphtml.

PHP was installed on more than 240 million websites (39% of those sampled) and 2.1 million web servers. Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994,the reference implementation of PHP (powered by the Zend Engine) is now produced by The PHP Group. While PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, it now stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, which is a recursive backronym.

PHP code can be simply mixed with HTML code, or it can be used in combination with various templating engines and web frameworks. PHP code is usually processed by a PHP interpreter, which is usually implemented as a web server's native module or a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executable. After the PHP code is interpreted and executed, the web server sends the resulting output to its client, usually in the form of a part of the generated web page; for example, PHP code can generate a web page's HTML code, an image, or some other data. PHP has also evolved to include a command-line interface (CLI) capability and can be used in standalone graphical applications

History:

PHP as it's known today is actually the successor to a product named PHP/FI. Created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf, the very first incarnation of PHP was a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries written in the C programming language. Originally used for tracking visits to his online resume, he named the suite of scripts "Personal Home Page Tools," more frequently referenced as "PHP Tools." Over time, more functionality was desired, and Rasmus rewrote PHP Tools, producing a much larger and richer implementation. This new model was capable of database interaction and more, providing a framework upon which users could develop simple dynamic web applications such as guestbooks. In June of 1995, Rasmus » released the source code for PHP Tools to the public, which allowed developers to use it as they saw fit. This also permitted - and encouraged - users to provide fixes for bugs in the code, and to generally improve upon it.

In September of that year, Rasmus expanded upon PHP and - for a short time - actually dropped the PHP name. Now referring to the tools as FI (short for "Forms Interpreter"), the new implementation included some of the basic functionality of PHP as we know it today. It had Perl-like variables, automatic interpretation of form variables, and HTML embedded syntax. The syntax itself was similar to that of Perl, albeit much more limited, simple, and somewhat inconsistent. In fact, to embed the code into an HTML file, developers had to use HTML comments. Though this method was not entirely well-received, FI continued to enjoy growth and acceptance as a CGI tool --- but still not quite as a language. However, this began to change the following month; in October, 1995, Rasmus released a complete rewrite of the code. Bringing back the PHP name, it was now (briefly) named "Personal Home Page Construction Kit," and was the first release to boast what was, at the time, considered an advanced scripting interface. The language was deliberately designed to resemble C in structure, making it an easy adoption for developers familiar with C, Perl, and similar languages. Having been thus far limited to UNIX and POSIX-compliant systems, the potential for a Windows NT implementation was being explored.

The code got another complete makeover, and in April of 1996, combining the names of past releases, Rasmus introduced PHP/FI. This second-generation implementation began to truly evolve PHP from a suite of tools into a programming language in its own right. It included built-in support for DBM, mSQL, and Postgres95 databases, cookies, user-defined function support, and much more. That June, PHP/FI was given a version 2.0 status. An interesting fact about this, however, is that there was only one single full version of PHP 2.0. When it finally graduated from beta status in November, 1997, the underlying parsing engine was already being entirely rewritten.

Though it lived a short development life, it continued to enjoy a growing popularity in still-young world of web development. In 1997 and 1998, PHP/FI had a cult of several thousand users around the world. A Netcraft survey as of May, 1998, indicated that nearly 60,000 domains reported having headers containing "PHP", indicating that the host server did indeed have it installed. This number equated to approximately 1% of all domains on the Internet at the time. Despite these impressive figures, the maturation of PHP/FI was doomed to limitations; while there were several minor contributors, it was still primarily developed by an individual.

founder of PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf (born 22 November 1968) is a Greenlandic programmer with Canadian citizenship. He created the PHP scripting language, authoring the first two versions of the language and participated in the development of later versions led by a group of developers including Jim Winstead (who later created blo.gs), Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski. He continues to contribute to the project.

Career

From September 2002 to November 2009 he was employed by Yahoo! Inc. as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer. In 2010, he joined WePay in order to develop their application programming interface.Throughout 2011 he was a roving consultant for startups. On 22 February 2012 he announced on Twitter that he had joined Etsy. In July, 2013 Rasmus joined Jelastic as a senior advisor to help them with the creation of new technology.

Lerdorf is a frequent speaker at Open Source conferences around the world. During his keynote presentation at OSCMS 2007, he presented a security vulnerability in each of the projects represented at the conference that year.