History of PHP

PHP(Hypertext Preprocessor) was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. It was initially developed for HTTP usage logging and server-side from generation in Unix.

PHP 2(1995) transformed the language into a server side embedded scripting language. Added database support, file uploads, variables, arrays, recursive functions, conditionals, iteration, regular expressions, etc.

PHP 3(1998) added support for ODBC data sources, multiple platform support, email protocols (SNMP, IMAP), and new parser written by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans.

PHP 4(2000) became an independent component of the web server for added efficiency. The parser was renamed the Zend engine. Many security features were added.

PHP 5(2004) adds Zend Engine II with object oriented programming, robust XML support using the libxml2 library, SOAP extension for interoperability with web services, SQLITE has been bundled with PHP

Introduction of PHP

PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly.

With PHP, you can do things like create username, and password login pages, check details from a form, create forums, blogs, picture galleries, and a whole lot more. PHP is a open source, you won't be spending any extra money to buy the software. It is free to usse. That's why PHP is popular!. PHP are executed mainly on the server so it is called as server side scripting language. The executed results are then sent back to the client browser.

Why is PHP used?

Easy to use, Code is embedded into HTML. The PHP code is enclosed in special start and end tags that allow you to jump into and out of "PHP mode". Cross platforms runs on almost any web server on several operating system. One of the strongest features is the wide range of supported database.