Straight from the mind

This is my first post in the series of posts that i would be writing on my experiences and findings in PHP. The post will tell you why PHP exists and how it has now come to be known as a mature language.

Background and History

• C not for Web
  Contrary to what people believe, there was a lot of activity on the web development front before PHP was invented. Code to parse form input was generally written in C. While it certainly executed quickly it was very clunky to program. A simple parsing script would easily take around fifty lines of code. The main reason being that C was not designed for the web and there was no pre-written code to take advantage of for common tasks like getting the inputs from a form and processing it. You had to do everything by yourself.

• PERL - Practical Extraction and Report Language
  This problem was solved by PERL. PERL was originally invented as a generic text-processing language that enabled HTML form parsing and other fancy tricks which made coding a simple task for even a novice programmer. Perl provided a very large number of built-in functions that were designed to do any task you could dream of, which made it very popular with developers.

• PERL being PERL-centric
  Even though Perl was a big leap in web development, it was still far from perfect. The largest drawback for Perl was that it was Perl-centric. i.e. in order to output HTML content, you had to embed HTML inside the Perl script.

Introducing PHP

• PHP - Personal Home Page
  PHP which initially stood for Personal Home Page began in 1994 as a set of CGI binaries written in C by a Danish programmer Rasmus Lerdorf. Lerdorf created these Personal Home Page tools to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage. The tools were used to perform tasks such as displaying his resume and how much traffic his page was receiving. Lerdorf released PHP in 1995 to accelerate bug reporting and improve the code.

• PHP 3 - PHP : Hypertext Preprocessor
  Two Israeli developers Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans took keen interest in the development of PHP. They rewrote the PHP parser from ground up using standard “compiler compiler” tools like Flex and Bison changing the languages name to the recursive initialism PHP : Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP 3 also made the language extensible allowing keen developers to add their own module for the language, adding functionality at the core level.

• PHP 4 - The Zend Relationship and Web Server Abstraction
  The most important change made for PHP 4 was the switch to what is called the Zend Engine. The Zend Engine, created by Zend, a company founded by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans to promote PHP in the corporate environment, allowed much more flexibility than had ever been seen in PHP before. Also introduced with PHP 4 was complete web server abstraction, which meant that PHP could now not only run on Apache but also Microsoft’s IIS, Zeus, AOLServer and more.

  Performance took a gigantic leap due to 2 main factors. Firstly, PHP 3 and before used the “execute while interpreting” paradigm. Whereas PHP 4 adopted the “compile first, execute later” paradigm, reading your entire script and compiling it to byte code before execution.

• PHP 5 - Language Maturity
  PHP 5, which is the current stable release of PHP focused on language maturity and offers a lot of new functionality to support larger projects. PHP5 brought with it huge steps forward for object oriented scripts and also a new error checking in the form of try/catch. The biggest improvements though were in the extensions like SimpleXML which is a fast and easy way to interact with XML documents, and there’s also the flat-file database API SQLite, a new SOAP extension and lot more

More info @ php.net & Practical PHP Programming

Part 2 of this series where i have summarized PHP and its extensions & frameworks is now available. Kindly Patronize