A brief History in PHP

Introduction on PHP

In this rapid world of Information and Technology PHP is one of the most used server-side scripting and programming language, almost 50% of web programmers uses PHP for their server side. This language is easy to learn and yet developed for purpose of web development. Though it also has some general usage. In the year 2013 PHP was found to be installed in more than 240 million websites which is more than 39 percent. Rasmus Lerdorf  Developed this dynamic language in 1994, its latest version was lately released in 18 December 2014 and it’s 5.6.4 version. PHP can be used along with HTML  for various operations in web applications that makes it robust  and popular. All codes coded in PHP are interpreted by PHP interpreter.

History of PHP

In the year 1994 PHP development was started by Rasmus Lerdorf, he started writing a series of CGI (Common Gateway Interface) binaries in the programming language called C. After working it for some time he added the ability to work with web forms feature and he also added the feature to communicate with databases. Several PHP versions have been released till now with different added features. In year 1995 on 8^th of June PHP version 1.0 was released, this came out to be the popular version and on 1997 the second version was released and introduced to market , this version contained more features compared to version 1.0. Version 3.0 on 20^th October 2000 was released after and so and so today we have version 5.6.4 of PHP. Version 4.1 in 2002 had a feature in it called SuperGlobals , and in the same year version 4.3 introduced command-line interface for the purpose of supplementing the CGI.

Features of PHP that make it so popular and robust language are listed below:

·        HTTP authentication with PHP: It is possible to use the header () function to send an Authentication required.

Cookies: PHP supports HTTP cookies; these are the mechanism for storing data in browser for tracking purpose.

Sessions: PHP supports session to preserve certain data who has frequent access; it enables more customized applications with best security.

Dealing with XForms:  XForms are used in wide variety of platform and browsers or even non-traditional media such as PDF documents, PHP deals with this variation of web forms.

Handling file uploads: PHP handles file uploads in wide range, single, multiple etc. mostly post and put methods are used in file handling.

Using remote files:  You can use HTTP and FTP URLs with most of the functions that tae a filename as a parameter as long as allow_url_fopen is enabled in php.ini.

Connection handling: In PHP always connection status is maintained, there are 4 possible states 0=Normal , 1=Aborted , 2=Timeout , 3= Aborted and Timeout.

Persistent Database Connections: These connections are those links which do not close when the execution of your scripts ends.

Safe Mode: PHP safe mode troubleshoots the shared-server security problem.

Command line uses:  The main focus of Command line uses is to enable developing shell application with PHP.

Garbage Collection: PHP keeps reference count for all variables and destroy them(in most cpnditions) as soon as this reference counts to zero.

DTrace Dynamic Tracing: DTrace can trace operating system behavior and user program execution.