Begin Web Programming with PHP & MySQL

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PHP History

PHP is actually the successor to a product named PHP/FI. Created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf, the very first incarnation of PHP was a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries written in the C programming language.

PHP 3.0 was the first version that closely resembles PHP as it exists today. One of the biggest strengths of PHP 3.0 was its strong extensibility features. In addition to providing end users with a mature interface for multiple databases, protocols, and APIs, the ease of extending the language itself attracted dozens of developers who submitted a variety of modules.

PHP 4.0, coupled with a wide range of additional new features, was officially released in May 2000, almost two years after its predecessor. In addition to the highly improved performance of this version, PHP 4.0 included other key features such as support for many more web servers, HTTP sessions, output buffering, more secure ways of handling user input and several new language constructs.

PHP 5 was released in July 2004 after long development and several pre-releases. It is mainly driven by its core, the Zend Engine 2.0 with a new object model and dozens of other new features.

The PHP development team announced the immediate availability of PHP 7.0.0. This release marks the start of the new major PHP 7 series. PHP 7.0.0 comes with a new version of the Zend Engine, numerous improvements and new features such as

  • Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6
  • Significantly reduced memory usage
  • Abstract Syntax Tree
  • Consistent 64-bit support
  • Improved Exception hierarchy
  • Many fatal errors converted to Exceptions
  • Secure random number generator
  • Removed old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
  • The null coalescing operator (??)
  • Return and Scalar Type Declarations
  • Anonymous Classes
  • Zero cost asserts

PHP 8.0 comes with numerous improvements and new features such as:

  • Union Types
  • Named Arguments
  • Match Expressions
  • Attributes
  • Constructor Property Promotion
  • Nullsafe Operator
  • Weak Maps
  • Just In Time Compilation
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