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php main
1. what is php
* a. php history
b. uses of php
c. php hello world
d. installing php
2. http basics
3. php basics
4. php expressions
5. php client side
6. php flow control
7. php manual


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PHP History

These tutorials are about PHP and its use for server-side Web programming.

PHP History

PHP, depending on who you talk to, either stands for Personal Home Page or for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. Since the person who wrote the language calls it Personal Home Page. it is a fair bet as to which is the correct rendition of the acronym.

HTTP server: a server that makes use of the HyperText Transfer Protocol. It is the more official name for a Web server

PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. It started as a collection of Unix-specific HTTP server modules, or tools, designed to assist in the maintenance of a small Web site. It is a language that has evolved considerably since its inception.

As a collection of tools, PHP is really a collection of modules managed by a central PHP parser. The modules that make up PHP are written in C. Since PHP is open source, if you are a competent C-programmer you can modify or add to PHP to suit your needs.

The original version of PHP was designed primarily to handle usage logging and server-side form generation. It was not a scripting language, just a set of server tools to help Mr. Lerdorf with Web site maintenance. Finding these tools to be useful, in June of 1995 he posted information on the modules to UseNET for others who might be interested in them.

About the same time, Rasmus Lerdorf began working on a large Web-based project for the University of Toronto. The project required the ability to pull data in from diverse sources and to provide a Web-based administrative interface for the system. He saw PHP as an ideal base to develop the tools he needed. The result was PHP 2.

PHP 2 went beyond logging utilities and became what Mr. Lerdorf himself called a "Server-side Embedded Scripting Language" [Lerdorf 2002, p.4]. This shift was in response to market demand. People didn't want to have to create writing new C-modules every time they had to do something new. Instead they wanted to be able to embed the logic directly into their Web pages.

The new version included:

  • logging
  • password access
  • support for mSQL, Postgres95, DB, DBM, NDBM, GDBM
  • file upload support
  • variables, arrays
  • recursive functions, conditionals and iteration
  • regular expresssions
  • HTTP header control
  • GIF image creation

By mid-1997 PHP was growing rapidly and people began to volunteer to help with its development. PHP ceased to be a single person's project and became a group effort. Two of the most profilic of the new actors were Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans. They completely rewrote the underlying parser, forming the basis of PHP 3. Since Rasmus Lerdorf was in Toronto and they were in Tel Aviv, they also made PHP a truly international effort.

PHP 3 was released in 1998 and was the first multi-platform version. Previous versions had been Unix only. It expanded database support to include ODBC data sources, included a revamped C API, and added support for various e-mail protocols, including SNMP and IMAP.

PHP 3 took off. With a growing sense that it was turning into a serious web development language, the development of PHP began to get correspondingly serious. With the release of PHP 4 in 2000, the architecture of the language had been entirely revamped. PHP was abstracted from the Web server, which is to say it became an independent component running on the server that was entirely divorced from the server architecture. The parsing process was improved for greater efficiency and security. Numerous features were added to make it a more secure server-side scripting language.

With the advent of PHP 4, the underlying parser was renamed the Zend engine after Zeev and Andi. [Zend Technologies] was incorporated as a company to market and sell PHP solutions. It currently markets extensive PHP solutions, incuding IDE applications and PHP document encryption tools that keep people from being able to see your code but still allow the server to execute it.

As of this writing, PHP is up to version 4.3. It fixes some bugs and really tightens up some security issues. By default, PHP is now configured for robust security rather than ease of use. PHP 5 is currently in Beta testing, and is meant to be a definitive XML processing engine, as well as still supporting all that has come before.

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These pages can be found at: [http://academ.hvcc.edu/~kantopet/]
Copyright 2003 -- Peter L. Kantor[]
Last Updated January 2003