20 Interesting facts about PHP: A PHP developer should know
abdul
Are you a PHP developer? Do you know all about PHP along with all
these facts that I am presenting to you below? I bet you you don’t
know at least 10 out of 20. You don’t believe me, lets read all 20
points below and find out how many of them you know already?
As a PHP developer you should know all these facts. I call them
interesting because, almost all points surprised me. Though I am a PHP
developer from the past 4 years but didn’t know all these facts.
1. PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page.
2. PHP which is now officially known as ‘Hypertext Preprocessor’ was
released in the year 1995.
3. Initially written as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) in
‘C’ (1994).
4. PHP was originally designed to replace a set of Perl scripts to
maintain his Personal Home Pages (also known as PHP).
5. PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. He wrote the
original Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries.
6. Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two developers at the Technion IIT,
rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3.
7. PHP 3 was official launched in June 1998.
8. Suraski and Gutmans rewrote the PHP 3’s core, producing the Zend
Engine in 1999. They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan,
Israel.
9. On May 22, 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was
released.
10. The main implementation of PHP is now produced by The PHP Group
and serves as the de facto standard for PHP as there is no formal
specification.
11. On July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by the new Zend
Engine II. PHP 5 introduced full featured object-oriented programming
support. It was there in PHP 3 and PHP 4 but only the basic features.
12. PHP is free software released under the PHP License, which is
incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL) due to
restrictions on the use of the term PHP.
13. PHP was originally designed to create dynamic and more interactive
web pages. It is the most widely-used, open-source and general-purpose
scripting language.
14. It is possible to use PHP in almost every operating system. PHP
can be used in all major operating systems including Linux, Microsoft
Windows, Mac OS X, and RISC OS.
15. PHP uses procedural programming or object oriented programming and
also a mixture of them.
16. PHP is installed on over 20 million websites and 1 million web
servers.
17. 75% of Web 2.0 sites are built in PHP.
18. There are about 5 million PHP developers worldwide.
19. The latest release of PHP till now is 5.3.0. It was released on
Jun 30, 2009. PHP 6 is under development alongside PHP 5. Major
changes include the removal of register_globals, magic quotes, and
safe mode. The reason for the removals was that register_globals had
given way to security holes, and magic quotes had an unpredictable
nature, and was best avoided.
20. Some of the biggest online brands, such as Facebook, ProProfs,
Digg, Friendster, Flickr, Technorati, and Yahoo! are powered by PHP.