PHP Where it all began

Believe it or not, PHP is a relatively new programming language. It was originally written by Rasmus Lerdorf. His goal was to add some functionality to his website that his web server could not handle. Soon many visitors inquired about the language and if they could use it for their site. Once they started to use it, they immediately wanted to add more features to it, and so with the help of many people, Rasmus created a new programming language. He called it PHP/FI which is short for Personal Home Pages/Form Interpreter.

After a fair amount of time working day in and day out, programming and reprogramming, PHP was released as PHP3. During the programming of the language, the team decided that they did not like Personal Home Pages and decided to change it to PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.

PHP4 is the evolution of PHP3. Many features were added, including a new engine called Zend. For more information about Zend, visit www.zend.com.

PHP is an amazing programming language for the web. It has the built in ability to act as an Object Oriented Programming language, but still be straight forward enough that anyone can use. Over the years PHP has become so popular, that nearly all Unix based web servers offer it, include Apple OS X.

I have been working with PHP for nearly three years now, and am still amazed by what it can do. I have yet to find a problem that I could not solve with PHP and I only expect more great things with PHP5.