PHP in little over 14 years have become one of the most popular prgramming language for web development.PHP or Hypertext Preprocessor’s have become popular on account of its ease of use,scalability and wide spread support for various databases and data formats.Another aspect of its ever growing popularity is that it is open source and hence freely available on the internet.These are the main reasons why PHP is used in over 30 million websites and more than one third of the web servers.

The earliest version of PHP,codenamed as PHP/FI was a fairly primitive language with support for form input and mSQL database.It lacked the security features and other features of today’s available versions.It constituted of Perl like variables,automatic interpretation of form variables and HTML embedded syntax.The first improvement to the basic language came from developer Rasmus Lerdorf,(who actually created PHP/FI),who improved the PHP/FI and released the PHP/FI 2.0.

In 1997,developers Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote the PHP syntax to form the PHP/FI 3.0 and the popularity of the language began to rise.More and more people participated in the enrichment of the language as the project was open sourced.The PHP/FI 3.0′s syntax was more powerful and consistent and allowed independent developers to create their own add ons and extensions.


The next version PHP 4.0 was released in 2000 boasted an improved object model and various security and performance improvements.OOP concepts were now being supported by PHP and this made programming a lot easier and hence the popularity of the open sourced language rose even further.Abstract classes,constructors,destructors and other OOP concepts became available to use.The new engine called as ‘ZEND’(ZEev and ANdi) made it possible to improve the performance of complex applications.

PHP 5.0 introduced exception handling,data access layer and an integrated database engine to further enhance the already feature-rich language.The PHP 5.0 engine(Zend Engine 2.0) also came with an optimized memory manager which improved the performance of the language in terms of speed of execution.The newest versions now supports namespaces an built in support for SQLite 3.0 and much more.

Well all these features have prompted developers to use PHP on their websites and hence PHP is now used in almost 30 million websites.Feature rich(now with over 5000 built in functions) yet free of cost.What more would you want?

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