History of PHP

PHP/FI

PHP succeeds an older product, named PHP/FI. PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online resume. He named this set of scripts "Personal Home Page Tools". As more functionality was required, Rasmus wrote a much larger C implementation, which was able to communicate with databases, and enabled users to develop simple dynamic Web applications. Rasmus chose to » release the source code for PHP/FI for everybody to see, so that anybody can use it, as well as fix bugs in it and improve the code.

PHP/FI, which stood for Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter, included some of the basic functionality of PHP as we know it today. It had Perl-like variables, automatic interpretation of form variables and HTML embedded syntax. The syntax itself was similar to that of Perl, albeit much more limited, simple, and somewhat inconsistent.

By 1997, PHP/FI 2.0, the second write-up of the C implementation, had a cult of several thousand users around the world (estimated), with approximately 50,000 domains reporting as having it installed, accounting for about 1% of the domains on the Internet. While there were several people contributing bits of code to this project, it was still at large a one-man project.

PHP/FI 2.0 was officially released only in November 1997, after spending most of its life in beta releases. It was shortly afterwards succeeded by the first alphas of PHP 3.0.

What is PHP?

PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor,Iit is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Hypertext Preprocessor (the name is a recursive acronym) is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language. PHP is a server-side, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages. PHP scripts are executed on the server. PHP is case sensitive.

Much of its syntax of PHP is borrowed from C, Java and Perl. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly.

PHP - What can it do?

 PHP will allow:

• Reduce the time to create large websites.              
  
• Required time to create webpages is very less.             
  
• Create a customized user experience for visitors based on information that you have gathered from them.
  
• Can store visitors based information.
  
• Online tools are available. So project development is very easy with PHP.
  
• Allow creation M-Commerce, e-commerce websites.
• Server-side scripting. 
• Command line scripting. 
• Writing desktop applications.
• PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, many Unix variants (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS, and probably others.
• PHP suports Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Personal Web Server, Netscape and iPlanet servers. So with PHP, you can choice an operating system and a web server.
• PHP supports ODBC, the Open Database Connection standard, so you can connect to any other database supporting this world standard.
  
• PHP support services using protocols such as LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP, COM (on Windows) and countless others.
  
• PHP has object oriented suport.
  

What You Should Know

Before starting programming with PHP, you should know:

• Basic programming knowledge - This is not mandatory, but if you have any traditional programming experience it will make helpful to program with PHP easyly.

Why has PHP become so popular ?

 PHP has been growing at very high rate for the past few years. Following a list of factors that might explain the growth of PHP:

1. PHP is a server-side scripting language which is Open Source and free;
   
2. So is a growing number of PHP web applications - start at PHP Resources;
   
3. PHP syntax is very familiar syntax to C, Perl and Java developers;
   
4. Popular databases can be connected very fast by PHP .
   
5. PHP has fast native connections to the Open Source MySQL database;
   
6. PHP runs reliably on Windows, Linux and Mac servers and clients;
   
7. PHP suports all popular browsers
   
8. PHP associative arrays are very useful.
   
9. PHP object oriented classes are easy to understand;
   
10. PHP has been very promiscuous-linking to PDF, SWF, XML, Java, etc, etc.

Advantages of PHP

1. One can very rapidly develop web applications in PHP.
2. PHP applications are very easy, stable and independent on the browser technologies.
3. PHP has excellent ability database conectivity to SQL database servers.
4. PHP has  support for Object oriented features (not 100%),
5. PHP has C++, Perl, Javascript like syntax features.
6. PHP runs on all operating system.
7. PHP suport any server platform 
8. PHP has error reporting option.
9. The browser does not know that the HTML page is generated by PHP !!

Limitations of PHP

No system is 100% ok. Every thing has some limitation. PHP also has some limitations are listed below.

1. PHP is NOT 100% pure Object Oriented scripting language. In future, it will support 100% Object Oriented scripting.
   
2. PHP will NOT give the performance of "C" or "C++" language.
   
3. PHP has no standard interface.
   
4.  Hard to debug code.
   

Conclusion

Although PHP has some limitations, but it is very neglagible. PHP is growing very fast. One can develop dynamic website in PHP in very sort time.