Technology Research
PHP
What is the technology?
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (Personal Home Page)
What it does?
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development. PHP generally runs on a web server. Any PHP code in a requested file is executed by the PHP runtime, usually to create dynamic web page content. It can also be used for command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications. PHP can be deployed on most web servers, many operating systems and platforms, and can be used with many relational database management systems. It is available free of charge, and the PHP Group provides the complete source code for users to build, customize and extend for their own use.
Who developed it? When? Why?
- PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online resume. He named this set of scripts ‘Personal Home Page Tools’. As more functionality was required, Rasmus wrote a much larger C implementation, which was able to communicate with databases, and enabled users to develop simple dynamic Web applications.
- PHP 3.0 was the first version that closely resembles PHP as we know it today. It was created by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski in 1997 as a complete rewrite. PHP 3.0 was officially released in June 1998, after having spent about 9 months in public testing.
- The new engine, dubbed ‘Zend Engine’ (comprised of their first names, Zeev and Andi), met these design goals successfully, and was first introduced in mid 1999. PHP 4.0, based on this engine, and coupled with a wide range of additional new features, was officially released in May 2000, almost two years after its predecessor, PHP 3.0. In addition to the highly improved performance of this version, PHP 4.0 included other key features such as support for many more Web servers, HTTP sessions, output buffering, more secure ways of handling user input and several new language constructs.
- PHP 5 was released in July 2004 after long development and several pre-releases. It is mainly driven by its core, the Zend Engine 2.0 with a new object model and dozens of other new features.
What groups were/are responsible for managing it?
PHP’s development team includes dozens of developers, as well as dozens others working on PHP-related projects such as PEAR and the documentation project.
Explain its growth or diminishment.
Growth, 4 updates since release planning on a 5th. Also working on improving it more and more.
What are related technologies?
- » PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository (originally, PHP Extension and Add-on Repository) is PHP’s version of foundation classes, and may grow in the future to be one of the key ways to distribute PHP extensions among developers.
- The » PHP Quality Assurance Initiative was set up in the summer of 2000 in response to criticism that PHP releases were not being tested well enough for production environments. The team now consists of a core group of developers with a good understanding of the PHP code base. These developers spend a lot of their time localizing and fixing bugs within PHP. In addition there are many other team members who test and provide feedback on these fixes using a wide variety of platforms.
- » PHP-GTK is the PHP solution for writing client side GUI applications.
Are there certifications for its use? If so, what? Where and how can one acquire them?
PHP 4 and PHP 5 certifications that you can acquire from brainbench after you complete and past their respective tests
Predict the future for the technology.
PHP 6 and Zend Engine 3 are the next updates that will eventually come out for the public use.
