A low, smooth learning curve. Broad functionality for databases, strings, network connectivity, file system support, Java, COM, XML, CORBA, WDDX, and Macromedia Flash. Platform compatibility with UNIX (all variants), Win32 (NT/95/98/2000), QNX, MacOS (WebTen), OSX, OS/2, and BeOS. Server compatibility for Apache module (UNIX, Win32), CGI/FastCGI, thttpd, fhttpd, phttpd, ISAPI (ISS, Zeus), NSAPI (Netscape iPlanet), Java servlet engines, AOLServer, and Roxen/Caudium module. A rapid development cycle. New versions with bug fixes, additional functionality, and other improvements are released every few months. A vibrant and supportive community. Code examples and free code abound. The PHP group has done an excellent job of providing new users with resources and support. Easy extensibility. We can easily roll out our own extensions to the language. A simple syntax that resembles C. It’s easy for experienced C, C++, Perl and shell coders to pick up PHP. Plus, it’s open source, and it’s free.
PHP Evolution
If you’re new to PHP, here’s a quick run down on where it’s been, where it is now, and where it’s going.
PHP Past
We will tersely summarize the history of PHP here, but we urge readers interested in the historical aspects of PHP development to review the introductory PHP presentations at http://conf.php.net/ or read the Brief History section in the PHP/FI 2 manual at http://php.net/docs.php
Rasmus Lerdorf conceived the idea of PHP in the fall of 1994. Version 1 of the language was implemented in the early 1995 and was embraced by a handful of users, following which Version 2 was released later the same year. Version 3 and 4 followed in 1997 and 2000 respectively.
PHP Present
As of the time of writing, PHP usage is growing at a rate of 15% each month, and is in use on at least twenty million domains (Source: Netcraft Survey), which is about 20% of all the domains registered so far. This is a significant chunk of the market, given that these figures do not account for the multitude of installations that run on intranets and private development servers.
PHP runs on 7 major platforms (stable), 10 server interfaces (stable), supports 40 stable extensions (and about as many experimental ones), and offers support to over 20 databases. These figures are testimony to the fact that PHP has grown to its current popularity based on its power and ease of use.
PHP Future
The PHP5 scripting engine is a second revision of the PHP4 scripting engine, and provides more obvious intrastate and services to the function modules, and implements the language syntax. This revised version is largely based on the same parsing rules as the PHP4 engine, thus providing goof backward compatibility and migration path from PHP4 to PHP5. But the downside is the limited scope of language-level improvements, to the PHP4 mindset.
With feedback from a multitude of PHP developers, Zend Technologies Ltd has embarked on a revision of the Zend Engine that will incorporate the PHP developers experience today. We urge you to add http://www.zend.com/zend/future.php to your list of favourite, and also subscribe to the Zend 2.0 monitoring the PHP roadmap.
