PHP (Personal Home Page Tools) — is a cross-platform, object-oriented programming language that was created in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf to generate HTML pages on the web server side.

This is also called open source language, which is supported by most hosting providers.

PHP is one of the most common programming languages used for web development (along with Java, .NET, Python, etc.).

 

The latest release version 7.3.3 was released on March 7, 2019.

 

Features of work

PHP is interpreted by the web server as HTML code that is passed to the client. This is an advantage from a security point of view, but it degrades the pages' interactivity. It is also possible to generate JavaScript codes, using PHP, that are already running on the client side

 

 

Advantages of PHP

 

• Support for interfaces to many databases - PHP built libraries for working with MySQL, PostgreSQL, mSQL, Oracle, dbm, Hyperware, InterBase, Sybase.
• Ease of learning - PHP will seem familiar to programmers working with other programming languages, since many syntax structures are borrowed from C or similar to Pascal.
• PHP - Open source software that is free to use
• Speed of work  - it is an interpreted programming language that allows you to handle scripts at a fairly high speed.

Development environments:

 

• DevPHP
• CodeGear Rad Studio
• DevelStudio (RAD)
• DevelNext (DN)
• PHPQt

 

History of development

 

PHP has come a long way for the last few years, becoming one of the most popular web programming languages.

1995 - created by Rasmus Lerdorf the very first product named PHP/FI and it was a set of Perl scripts to keep statistics of visits to his resume. The development of the web has just begun, there were no special tools to solve these problems and Lerdorf began to distribute his toolkit, called "Personal Homepages Tools" (PHP) - tools for personal home pages for free. Over time, Rasmus writes a new, much broader version of C that works with databases and allows users to develop the simplest of web applications. Rasmus Lerdorf decided to put the PHP/FI source code for review, bug fixes and add-ons.

1997 - PHP / FI2.0 is released. The second version brought together a group of users around the world, which was approximately several thousand. Although several people have been involved in the development, PHP / FI 2.0 is still one big project.

1998 - PHP3 was released, which was the first version to resemble modern PHP. One of the advantages of PHP 3.0 was the ability to extend the kernel. In the future, the writing interface extensions attracted a lot of third-party developers working on their modules, which allowed PHP to work with a large number of databases, protocols, to support a large number of APIs. The language was called 'PHP'.

1999 - 2000 - created a new engine - 'Zend Engine' (www.zend.com), which is the base of PHP 4.0. PHP 4.0 had better performance, got session support, safer ways to handle user input, and several new language constructs.

2004 - The 5th version of PHP was released, which included Zend (Zend Engine 2) changes, which improved the interpreter's performance, and introduced XML markup language support.

2006 - development of version 6 started, which included such innovations as exclusion from the regular expression kernel - POSIX and long superglobal arrays, removal of safe_mode, magic_quotes_gpc and register_globals directories from the php.ini configuration file.

2015 - announced the release of PHP version 7.0.0, based on an experimental PHP branch called phpng (PHP Next Generation), designed to improve performance and reduce memory consumption. The new version has the ability to specify the type of data returned from the function, control the data types transmitted for the function and new operators.

 

New in PHP as of August 2019:

 

• Advanced coding style standard - PRS - 12
• A new version is expected in late August 2019 - PHP 7.4.0 beta 2
• There is a proposal to create a "sister" language for PHP - P ++ that will be backwards compatible with PHP.
• Syntax sugar for PHPUnit appears- nunomaduro/pest 
• Library for easy use of page meta information by URL - mpratt/Embera
• Implemented static constructors like in C #, executed at most 1 time and implemented with the help of a special loader -  php-static-constructors
• Baseline for static analysis tools implemented - DaveLiddament/sarb