PHP is a common scripting language built for web development. The brainchild of Rasmus Lerdorf in the year 1995, it is being constantly developed. PHP programming stood for “personal home page”. Rasmus used Perl scripts to keep his resume up to date, and check on the hits that his page was getting. These scripts allowed him to work with databases and web forms. He then gradually moved on to developing dynamic web applications. On June 8th, 1995, Rasmus unveiled the ‘Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter 1.0’. This program was used to weed out bugs, and speeded up code improvement. It possessed the functions that PHP programming has today. It was a step up from the original Perl script because it was user friendly and easier.
PHP Version 2.0
Then, came the sleeker and faster PHP/FI 2.0 in November 1997. Soon afterwards, when the popularity began to pick up, developers came up with the third version.
PHP version 3.0
The upgrade closely resembled the version that we see today. The work that Rasmus Lerdorf started was continued by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski. They found out that PHP Version 2 was too weak to power up modern eCommerce applications. The three worked together and came up with a newer version of PHP called simply ‘PHP 3’. The strength of this PHP programming was its extensibility.
It had support for various protocols, API and databases. PHP version 3.0 also introduced object-oriented syntax support. By the end of 1998, about ten percent of servers had PHP installed on their systems.
PHP Version 4.0
Version 4 was introduced in the winter of 1998. This was basically the redevelopment of PHP’s core. Once it was out, PHP programming offered support for Web servers, http sessions, buffering and a secure way of managing input.