About PHP

PHP was written as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries in the C programming language by the Danish/Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage. Lerdorf initially created PHP to display his résumé and to collect certain data, such as how much traffic his page was receiving. Personal Home Page Tools was publicly released on 8 June 1995 in order to speed up the process of finding bugs and to help improve the code more quickly, after Lerdorf combined it with his own Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI (this release is considered PHP version 2), which had more functionality, including a much larger C implementation which was used to communicate with databases, and helped developers to build simple, dynamic web applications. At this point, PHP already included some of the basic functionality that exist in PHP today, such as Perl-like variables, form handling, and the ability to embed HTML. The syntax was built to be similar to Perl, but was more limited, simple, and less consistent in comparison.

Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two Israeli developers at the Technion IIT, rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Public testing of PHP 3 began 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. They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel, which actively manages the development of PHP.

In May 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. The most recent update released by The PHP Group, is for the older PHP version 4 code branch which, as of January 2008, is up to version 4.4.8. PHP 4 will be supported by security updates until August 8, 2008.

On July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released powered by the new Zend Engine II. PHP 5 included new features such as improved support for object-oriented programming, the PHP Data Objects extension (which defines a lightweight and consistent interface for accessing databases), and numerous performance enhancements.

Currently, PHP 5.x is the only stable version that is being actively developed; active development on PHP 4 ceased at the end of 2007. However, critical security updates for PHP 4 will be provided until August 8, 2008. PHP 6 is currently under development. As a result of the GoPHP5 initiative, a consortium of PHP developers promoting the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5, many high profile open source projects ceased to support PHP 4 in new code as of 5 February 2008. parse error unexpected t_string