PHP History

1994 Rasmus Lerdorf a software engineer and Apache team member is the creator and original driving force behind PHP. The first part of PHP was developed for his personal use in late 1994. This was a CGI wrapper that helped him keep track of people who looked at his personal site.

1995 Rasmus Lerdorf creates the Personal Home Page Tools (a.k.a. The PHP Construction Kit) in response to demand from users. Version 2 was soon released under the title PHP/FI and included the Form Interpreter, a tool for parsing SQL queries.

1997 PHP was being used on approximately 50,000 sites worldwide. It was clearly becoming too big for any single person to handle, even someone as focused and energetic as Rasmus. A small core development team now runs the project on the open source "benevolent junta" model, with contributions from developers and users around the world. Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, the two Israeli programmers who developed the PHP3 and PHP4 parsers, have also generalized and extended their work under the rubric of Zend.com.

1998 and beyond The fourth quarter of 1998 initiated a period of explosive growth for PHP, as all open source technologies enjoyed massive publicity. In October 1998, just over 100,000 unique domains used PHP in some way. One year later, PHP broke 1 million domains. Public PHP deployments run mass-market sites such as Excite Webmail and the Indianapolis 500 Web site, which serve up millions of page views per day, through sites such as Sourceforge.net and Epinions.com, which require higher functionality needs and hundreds of thousands of users, to e-commerce and brochure ware sites such as Harvard Bookstore which must be visually attractive and easy to update. There are also PHP-enabled parts of sites, such as the forums on the Internet Movie Database. PHP5's newly rebuilt object model aligns PHP with other object-oriented languages such as Java and C++, offering support for features such as overloading, interfaces, private member variables and methods, and other standard OOP constructions.