What is PHP?

PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor.

PHP is a server-side scripting language that was specifically designed for web development. It is a powerful and popular language that is widely used for creating dynamic and interactive web applications.

History and Evolution

PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 as a set of Perl scripts to track visits to his online resume. It was later rewritten as a scripting language and released as PHP/FI (Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter) in 1995. The language gained popularity and underwent significant improvements and enhancements over time.

The PHP development community released PHP 3 in 1998, which introduced a more robust and feature-rich PHP. With PHP 4’s release in 2000, PHP became a powerful server-side scripting language, supporting object-oriented programming (OOP) and providing better performance. PHP 5, released in 2004, further enhanced PHP’s capabilities with features like improved OOP support, exception handling, and the introduction of the Zend Engine.

PHP 7, released in 2015, marked a major milestone for the language. It brought significant performance improvements, a more consistent and expressive syntax, and introduced features like scalar type declarations and return type declarations. Subsequent versions such as PHP 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, and PHP 8 introduced additional features, performance enhancements, and security improvements.