PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used server-side scripting language that was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. PHP was originally designed as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts to help Rasmus track visits to his personal website. Over time, he added more functionality to these scripts and released them as Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools). In 1995, he released version 2 of PHP, which was a complete rewrite of the original scripts and included support for database connectivity.
As PHP gained popularity, other developers began contributing to its development and expanding its capabilities. In 1997, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote the PHP engine, creating the Zend Engine. This new engine added support for object-oriented programming (OOP) and greatly improved performance.
The release of PHP 3 in 1998 marked a major milestone for the language, with a number of new features and improvements, including support for cookies and sessions. In 2000, PHP 4 was released, which included even more features, such as improved handling of XML and file uploads.
In 2004, the PHP Group released PHP 5, which introduced a number of significant improvements, including support for OOP, exception handling, and improved performance. In 2014, PHP 5.6 was released, followed by PHP 7.0 in 2015, which included even more improvements to performance and memory usage.
Today, PHP is one of the most popular server-side scripting languages, with a large and active community of developers. PHP is used by millions of websites and web applications, from small personal websites to large enterprise applications.
PHP is an open-source language, meaning that its source code is freely available and can be modified and redistributed by anyone. This has allowed for a large and vibrant ecosystem of PHP frameworks, libraries, and tools, making it easier to develop web applications using PHP.
Few more statistics about PHP.
PHP is currently the fourth most popular programming language in the world, according to the TIOBE index, which ranks programming languages based on their popularity.
PHP is used by over 78% of all websites with a known server-side programming language, according to W3Techs.
PHP is an open-source language, which means that its source code is freely available to anyone who wants to use or modify it.