- PHP Tutorial
- PHP - Home
- PHP - Introduction
- PHP - Installation
- PHP - History
- PHP - Syntax
- PHP - Hello World
- PHP - Comments
- PHP - Variables
- PHP - Echo/Print
- PHP - var_dump
- PHP - $ and $$ Variables
- PHP - Constants
- PHP - Magic Constants
- PHP - Data Types
- PHP - Type Casting
- PHP - Type Juggling
- PHP - Strings
- PHP - Boolean
- PHP - Integers
- PHP - Files & I/O
- PHP - Maths Functions
- PHP - Heredoc & Nowdoc
- PHP - Compound Types
- PHP - File Include
- PHP - Date & Time
- PHP - Scalar Type Declarations
- PHP - Return Type Declarations
- PHP Operators
- PHP - Operators
- PHP - Arithmatic Operators
- PHP - Comparison Operators
- PHP - Logical Operators
- PHP - Assignment Operators
- PHP - String Operators
- PHP - Array Operators
- PHP - Conditional Operators
- PHP - Spread Operator
- PHP - Null Coalescing Operator
- PHP - Spaceship Operator
- PHP Control Statements
- PHP - Decision Making
- PHP - If…Else Statement
- PHP - Switch Statement
- PHP - For Loop
- PHP - Foreach Loop
- PHP - While Loop
- PHP - Do…While Loop
- PHP - Break Statement
- PHP - Continue Statement
- PHP Arrays
- PHP - Arrays
- PHP - Indexed Array
- PHP - Associative Array
- PHP - Multidimensional Array
- PHP - Array Functions
- PHP - Constant Arrays
- PHP Functions
- PHP - Functions
- PHP - Function Parameters
- PHP - Call by value
- PHP - Call by Reference
- PHP - Default Arguments
- PHP - Named Arguments
- PHP - Variable Arguments
- PHP - Returning Values
- PHP - Passing Functions
- PHP - Recursive Functions
- PHP - Type Hints
- PHP - Variable Scope
- PHP - Strict Typing
- PHP - Anonymous Functions
- PHP - Arrow Functions
- PHP - Variable Functions
- PHP - Local Variables
- PHP - Global Variables
- PHP Superglobals
- PHP - Superglobals
- PHP - $GLOBALS
- PHP - $_SERVER
- PHP - $_REQUEST
- PHP - $_POST
- PHP - $_GET
- PHP - $_FILES
- PHP - $_ENV
- PHP - $_COOKIE
- PHP - $_SESSION
- PHP File Handling
- PHP - File Handling
- PHP - Open File
- PHP - Read File
- PHP - Write File
- PHP - File Existence
- PHP - Download File
- PHP - Copy File
- PHP - Append File
- PHP - Delete File
- PHP - Handle CSV File
- PHP - File Permissions
- PHP - Create Directory
- PHP - Listing Files
- Object Oriented PHP
- PHP - Object Oriented Programming
- PHP - Classes and Objects
- PHP - Constructor and Destructor
- PHP - Access Modifiers
- PHP - Inheritance
- PHP - Class Constants
- PHP - Abstract Classes
- PHP - Interfaces
- PHP - Traits
- PHP - Static Methods
- PHP - Static Properties
- PHP - Namespaces
- PHP - Object Iteration
- PHP - Encapsulation
- PHP - Final Keyword
- PHP - Overloading
- PHP - Cloning Objects
- PHP - Anonymous Classes
- PHP Web Development
- PHP - Web Concepts
- PHP - Form Handling
- PHP - Form Validation
- PHP - Form Email/URL
- PHP - Complete Form
- PHP - File Inclusion
- PHP - GET & POST
- PHP - File Uploading
- PHP - Cookies
- PHP - Sessions
- PHP - Session Options
- PHP - Sending Emails
- PHP - Sanitize Input
- PHP - Post-Redirect-Get (PRG)
- PHP - Flash Messages
- PHP AJAX
- PHP - AJAX Introduction
- PHP - AJAX Search
- PHP - AJAX XML Parser
- PHP - AJAX Auto Complete Search
- PHP - AJAX RSS Feed Example
- PHP XML
- PHP - XML Introduction
- PHP - Simple XML Parser
- PHP - SAX Parser Example
- PHP - DOM Parser Example
- PHP Login Example
- PHP - Login Example
- PHP - Facebook Login
- PHP - Paypal Integration
- PHP - MySQL Login
- PHP Advanced
- PHP - MySQL
- PHP.INI File Configuration
- PHP - Array Destructuring
- PHP - Coding Standard
- PHP - Regular Expression
- PHP - Error Handling
- PHP - Try…Catch
- PHP - Bugs Debugging
- PHP - For C Developers
- PHP - For PERL Developers
- PHP - Frameworks
- PHP - Core PHP vs Frame Works
- PHP - Design Patterns
- PHP - Filters
- PHP - JSON
- PHP - Exceptions
- PHP - Special Types
- PHP - Hashing
- PHP - Encryption
- PHP - is_null() Function
- PHP - System Calls
- PHP - HTTP Authentication
- PHP - Swapping Variables
- PHP - Closure::call()
- PHP - Filtered unserialize()
- PHP - IntlChar
- PHP - CSPRNG
- PHP - Expectations
- PHP - Use Statement
- PHP - Integer Division
- PHP - Deprecated Features
- PHP - Removed Extensions & SAPIs
- PHP - PEAR
- PHP - CSRF
- PHP - FastCGI Process
- PHP - PDO Extension
- PHP - Built-In Functions
- PHP Useful Resources
- PHP - Questions & Answers
- PHP - Useful Resources
- PHP - Discussion
PHP - Introduction
PHP started out as a small open source project that evolved as more and more people found out how useful it was. Rasmus Lerdorf released the first version of PHP way back in 1994. Initially, PHP was supposed to be an abbreviation for "Personal Home Page", but it now stands for the recursive initialism "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor".
Lerdorf began PHP development in 1993 by writing several Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs in C, which he used to maintain in his personal homepage. Later on, He extended them to work with web forms and to communicate with databases. This implementation of PHP was "Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter" or PHP/FI.
Today, PHP is the world’s most popular server-side programming language for building web applications. Over the years, it has gone through successive revisions and versions.
PHP Versions
PHP was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 as a simple set of CGI binaries written in C. He called this suite of scripts "Personal Home Page Tools". It can be regarded as PHP version 1.0.
In April 1996, Rasmus introduced PHP/FI. Included built-in support for DBM, mSQL, and Postgres95 databases, cookies, user-defined function support. PHP/FI was given the version 2.0 status.
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor – PHP 3.0 version came about when Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the PHP parser and acquired the present-day acronym. It provided a mature interface for multiple databases, protocols and APIs, object-oriented programming support, and consistent language syntax.
PHP 4.0 was released in May 2000 powered by Zend Engine. It had support for many web servers, HTTP sessions, output buffering, secure ways of handling user input and several new language constructs.
PHP 5.0 was released in July 2004. It is mainly driven by its core, the Zend Engine 2.0 with a new object model and dozens of other new features. PHP's development team includes dozens of developers and others working on PHP-related and supporting projects such as PEAR, PECL, and documentation.
PHP 7.0 was released in Dec 2015. This was originally dubbed PHP next generation (phpng). Developers reworked Zend Engine is called Zend Engine 3. Some of the important features of PHP 7 include its improved performance, reduced memory usage, Return and Scalar Type Declarations and Anonymous Classes.
PHP 8.0 was released on 26 November 2020. This is a major version having many significant improvements from its previous versions. One standout feature is Just-in-time compilation (JIT) that can provide substantial performance improvements. The latest version of PHP is 8.2.8, released on July 4th, 2023.
PHP Application Areas
PHP is one of the most widely used language over the web. Here are some of the application areas of PHP −
PHP is a server-side scripting language that is embedded in HTML. It is used to manage dynamic content, databases, session tracking, even build entire e-commerce sites. Although it is especially suited to web development, you can also build desktop standalone applications as PHP also has a command-line interface. You can use PHP-GTK extension to build GUI applications in PHP.
PHP is widely used for building web applications, but you are not limited to output only HTML. PHP's ouput abilities include rich file types, such as images or PDF files, encrypting data, and sending emails. You can also output easily any text, such as JSON or XML.
PHP is a cross-platform language, capable of running on all major operating system platforms and with most of the web server programs such as Apache, IIS, lighttpd and nginx. PHP also supports other services using protocols such as LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP, COM, etc.
Here are some more important features of PHP −
PHP performs system functions. It can create, open, read, write, and close the files.
PHP can handle forms. It can gather data from files, save data to a file, through email you can send data, return data to the user.
You add, delete, modify elements within your database through PHP.
Access cookies variables and set cookies.
Using PHP, you can restrict users to access some pages of your website.
It can encrypt data.
PHP provides a large number of reusable classes and libraries are available on "PEAR" and "Composer". PEAR (PHP Extension and Application Repository) is a distribution system for reusable PHP libraries or classes. "Composer" is a dependency management tool in PHP.