History and Evolution of PHP: From Beginnings to Modern Use

Rumman Ansari   Software Engineer   2024-07-09 09:59:16   8470  Share
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PHP stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor” where “Preprocessor” means that changes happen before the HTML page is created. This converts static webpage to dynamic webpage with the capacity to interact with databases. The PHP programming language is commonly used for developing web-based software applications. However, the use of the language is not limited to web development and it can also be used for developing GUI applications. As per netcraft.com in 2013, PHP found application in over 244 million websites.

History and Evolution of PHP

PHP was designed for web development, intended to fill the gap between Server Side Includes (SSI) and Perl. The language’s roots were laid in 1994 through the work of Rasmus Lerdorf who scripted a series of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries in C to maintain his homepage. Gradually, he improved these to include the ability to interact with databases and web forms and named it PHP/FI meaning “Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter”. The first version of PHP/FI was released in 1995 with syntax, variables and form handling resembling Perl language. The second version PHP/FI 2 was released in 1997.

The team enlarged in 1997 to include Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans who re-scripted the parser to form the base of PHP3 and renamed it PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. The rewriting work continued further and in 1999, it led to the development of Zend Engine which served as an interpreter for PHP language.

Over the years, the updating of the language has continued and the latest version PHP 5.6.4 was released in December 2014.

What's new in PHP 7

  • PHP 7 is much faster than the previous popular stable release (PHP 5.6)
  • PHP 7 has Improved Error Handling
  • PHP 7 supports stricter Type Declarations for function arguments
  • PHP 7 supports new operators (like the spaceship operator: <=> )

What's new in PHP 8

PHP 8 is the latest major release of the PHP language and comes with several new features and improvements over its predecessor, PHP 7. Some of the notable new features in PHP 8 are:

  1. JIT Compiler: PHP 8 comes with a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler, which can significantly improve the performance of certain types of applications.

  2. Union Types: PHP 8 introduces the ability to declare union types, allowing for more flexibility when defining function and method parameters.

  3. Named Arguments: PHP 8 now allows named arguments in function calls, which can make code more readable and maintainable.

  4. Attributes: PHP 8 introduces attributes, which are a way to add metadata to classes, functions, and properties.

  5. Match Expressions: PHP 8 introduces match expressions, which provide a more concise and readable syntax for switch-like statements.

  6. Nullsafe Operator: PHP 8 introduces a new nullsafe operator (??) that can simplify null value checking in complex expressions.

Overall, PHP 8 provides a significant performance boost and several new features that can make PHP development faster, more efficient, and more flexible.