Brief History of PHP

u     PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. It was initially developed for HTTP usage logging and server-side form generation in Unix

u     PHP 2 (1995) transformed the language into a Server-side embedded scripting language. Added database support, file uploads, variables, arrays, recursive functions, conditionals, iteration, regular expressions, etc.

u     PHP 3 (1998) added support for ODBC data sources, multiple platform support, email protocols (SNMP,IMAP), and new parser written by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans .

u     PHP 4 (2000) became an independent component of the web server for added efficiency. The parser was renamed the Zend Engine. Many security features were added.

u    PHP 5 (2004) adds Zend Engine II with object oriented programming, robust XML support using the libxml2 library, SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services, SQLite has been bundled with PHP