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PHP is a popular open-source, reflective programming language used mainly for developing server-side applications and dynamic web content, and more recently, other software. Originally, PHP stood for "Personal Home Page". Today, the official meaning is the recursive acronym "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor". Famous examples of PHP applications include phpBB as well as MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. The PHP model can be seen as an alternative to Microsoft's ASP.NET/C#/VB.NET system, Macromedia's ColdFusion system, Sun Microsystems' JSP/Java system, and to the CGI/Perl system. OverviewPHP's ease of use and similarity with the most common structured programming languages—most notably C and Perl (and from version 5, Java)—allows most experienced programmers to start developing complex applications with minimal learning. It also enables experienced developers to get involved with dynamic web content applications without having to learn a whole new set of functions and practices. One of the more attractive parts of PHP is that it is more than just a scripting programming language. Due to its modular design PHP is also used to develop GUI applications (using PHP-GTK), and can be used from the command line just like Perl or Python. PHP allows interaction with a large number of relational database management systems, such as MySQL, Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL and SQLite while maintaining a simple and straightforward syntax. PHP runs on most major operating systems, including UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, and can interact with many major web servers. The official PHP website (http://www.php.net/) contains extensive documentation (http://www.php.net/manual/). The Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) architecture has become popular in the Web industry as a way of deploying inexpensive, reliable, scalable, secure web applications. (The 'P' in LAMP can also stand for Perl or Python.) Alternatively, the Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP (WIMP - see the LAMP page) and Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP (WAMP) architectures exists as alternatives for those wishing to use Windows as their server operating system. PHP is the result of the efforts of many contributors. It is licensed under a BSD-style license, the PHP license. PHP, from version 4, has been powered by the Zend engine. HistoryPHP was originally designed as a small set of Perl scripts, followed by a rewritten set of CGI binaries written in C by the Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 to display his résumé and to collect certain data, such as how much traffic his page was receiving. "Personal Home Page Tools" was publicly on 8th June 1995 after Lerdorf combined it with his own Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI. Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two Israeli developers of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to its current recursive form. The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Public testing of PHP 3 began immediately and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP's core, producing the Zend engine in 1999 (a page at www.zend.com (http://www.zend.com/zend/zend-engine-summary.php) states that PHP 3 was powered by Zend Engine 0.5). They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel which has since overseen the PHP advances. In May 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. On July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by Zend Engine II (formerly known as Zend Engine 2). PHP 5.1 is currently in beta testing (http://www.php.net/downloads.php#v5.1) (beta 3) and will include new features such as PDO (PHP Data Objects) and more performance enhancements taking advantage of the new Zend Engine 2. PopularityPHP is currently one of the most popular server-side scripting systems on the Web. It has been widely adopted since the release of version 4. One major part of PHP which has helped it become popular is that it is a very loose language; in particular, it is dynamically typed. That is, the rules aren't as strict with variables—they don't have to be declared and they can hold any type of object. Arrays are heterogenous, meaning a single array can contain objects of more than one type. According to Netcraft's April 2002 survey, PHP is now the most deployed server-side scripting language, running on around 9 million of the 37 million domains in their survey. This is confirmed by PHP's own figures, which show PHP usage (measured on a per-domain basis) growing at around 5% per month. In May 2003, almost 13 million domains were using PHP, based on the same source.[1] (http://www.php.net/usage.php) Due to PHP's popularity in the web space, a new breed of programmer emerged who are only familiar with PHP. This encouraged the development of a command line interface for PHP, as well as GUI libraries such as GTK+ and text mode libraries like Ncurses and Newt. This was a major step for PHP, because it helped move it from being a language used only for CGI to a general-purpose programming language. On the desktop it has been favored by some new programmers as a rapid prototyping environment. |
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