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When Andi and Zeev emailed Rasmus with the news about their rewrite, they wondered if he would accept this new work, as it essentially meant discarding his implementation. Rasmus did accept it, and a new body was formed— the PHP Core Team, known today as the PHP Group. Along with Andi, Rasmus, and Zeev, three other developers— Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, and Jim Winstead— were accepted to the Core Team. A community of developers started growing around PHP.
After seven months of development, alpha and beta testing, PHP version 3. 0 was officially released on June 6, 1998, and started bending the curve of PHP's growth to unprecedented angles. PHP's functionality was growing on a daily basis, and PHP applications were popping up everywhere. Following the release, Open Source projects written in PHP flourished. Projects like Phorum tackled long-time Internet tasks such as hosting online discussion. The PHPLib project provided a framework for handling user sessions that inspired new code in PHP. FreeTrade, a project I led, offered a toolkit for building e-commerce sites.
Writing about PHP increased as well. More than 20 articles appeared on high-traffic sites such as webmonkey. com and techweb. com. Sites dedicated to supporting PHP developers were launched. The first two books about PHP were published in May 1999. Egon Schmid, Christian Cartus, and Richard Blume wrote a book in German called PHP: Dynamische Webauftritte professionell realisieren. Prentice Hall published the first edition of my book, Core PHP Programming. Since then, countless books about PHP fill bookstore shelves.
Given this background, there were no reasons not to be happy with the way PHP was back then. Perhaps the internal knowledge of what was going on under the hood and the feeling familiar to every developer—" I could have done it much better"— were the reasons that Andi and Zeev were some of the very few people who felt unhappy with PHP 3. As if out of habit, they withdrew from the PHP community and attempted to design a new approach towards executing PHP scripts.
A few months later, on January 4, 1999, Zeev and Andi announced a new framework that promised to increase dramatically the performance of PHP scripts. They dubbed the new framework the Zend Engine. Early tests showed script execution times dropping by a factor of 100. In addition, new features for compiling scripts into binary, debugging, optimization, and profiling were planned. This announcement officially ended the PHP 3. 1 project, which was supposed to bring better Windows support to PHP 3 but failed to gain momentum, and officially started the planning of PHP 4.
Work on the Zend Engine and PHP 4 continued in parallel with bug fixes and enhancements to PHP 3. During 1999, eight incremental versions were released, and on December 29, 1999, PHP version 3.0.13 was announced. A PHP beta based on the Zend Engine became publicly available in July 19, 1999, and was followed by an intense development period of various components, some of which were brand new, such as built-in session handling, output buffering, and a Web server abstraction layer. The release of PHP 4 on May 22, 2000, marked another important milestone on PHP's journey to becoming the most popular Web development platform on earth. The number of people working on various levels of PHP has grown immensely, and new projects, most notably PEAR, gained momentum and started pushing PHP to new heights of popularity.
The PHP community drives the development of new features. Many programmers find inspiration in object-oriented programming. PHP 3 introduced objects as syntactic sugar. That is, while the syntax used for objects was different, the underlying implementation varied little from arrays. It attracted many object-oriented advocates, but the limited implementation left them desiring more. PHP 5 addresses these needs with a strong, rebuilt object system.
PHP is not a shrink-wrapped product made by faceless drones or wizards in an ivory tower. PHP started as a simple tool brought into the bazaar described by Eric Raymond in his essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Once it appeared, anyone could make improvements, and many did. Their aim seems to be to achieve solutions of direct, personal interest. If a client comes along who requires a project to use a database not supported by PHP, you simply write an extension. Then you give it to the PHP project. Soon, other people are fixing your bugs.
Yet, the vast majority of PHP users never write an extension. They happily find everything they need in the contributed works of others. Those who've contributed thousands of lines of code to PHP perhaps never consider themselves heroes. They don't trumpet their accomplishments. But because each part of PHP came from a real person, I would like to point them out. When appropriate, I'll note who added a particular extension.
You can find an up-to-date list of credits on the PHP site <http://www.php.net/credits.php>.
In previous years, skeptics may have asked, Why should I learn PHP? Today, PHP's popularity is enough to generate interest in learning it. PHP is a standard feature offered by most Web hosting companies. However, it is interesting to understand why so many people choose PHP over alternatives.
Perl adapted well to being a CGI solution. Microsoft provides its Active Server Pages with Internet Information Server. Middleware, like Macromedia's Cold Fusion, is yet another solution. ServerWatch. com lists hundreds of Web technologies, some costing tens of thousands of dollars. Why should you choose PHP over any of these alternatives?
The short answer is that PHP is better. It is faster to code and faster to execute. The same PHP code runs unaltered on different Web servers and different operating systems. Additionally, functionality that is standard with PHP is an add-on in other environments. A more detailed argument follows.
PHP is free. Anyone may visit the PHP Web site <http://www.php.net/> and download the complete source code, licensed under a BSD-style license <http://www.php.net/license/>. Binaries are also available for Windows. The result is easy entry into the experience. There is very little risk in trying PHP, and its license allows the code to be used to develop works with no royalties. This is unlike products such as Allaire's Cold Fusion, which costs thousands of dollars for the software to interpret and serve scripts. Even commercial giants like Netscape and IBM now recognize the advantages of making source code available.
PHP runs on UNIX, Windows, and Macintosh OS X. PHP is designed to integrate with the Apache Web server. Apache, another free technology, is the most popular Web server on the Internet and comes with source code for UNIX and Windows. PHP works with other Web servers, including Microsoft's Internet Information Server. Scripts may be moved between server platforms without alteration. PHP supports ISAPI to allow for the performance benefits of tight coupling with Microsoft Web servers.
PHP is modifiable. PHP is designed to allow for future extension of functionality. PHP is coded in C and provides a well-defined application programming interface (API). Capable programmers may add new functionality easily. The rich set of functions available in PHP is evidence that they often do. Even if you aren't interested in changing the source code, it's comforting to know you can inspect it. Doing so may give you greater confidence in PHP's robustness.PHP was written for Web page creation. Perl, C, and Java are very good general languages and are certainly capable of driving Web applications. The unfortunate sacrifice these alternatives make is the ease of communication with the Web experience. PHP applications may be rapidly and easily developed because the code is encapsulated in the Web pages themselves.
Support for PHP is free and readily available. Queries to the PHP mailing lists are often answered within minutes. A custom bug-tracking system on the PHP site shows each problem along with its resolution. Numerous sites, such as phpbuilder. com and zend. com, offer original content to PHP developers.
PHP is popular. Internet service providers find PHP to be an attractive way to allow their customers to code Web applications without the risks exposed by CGIs. Developers worldwide offer PHP programming. Sites coded in PHP will have the option of moving from one host to another as well as a choice of developers to add functionality.
Programming skills developed in other structured languages can be applied to PHP. PHP takes inspiration from both Perl and C. Experienced Perl and C programmers learn PHP very quickly. Likewise, programmers who learn PHP as a first language may apply their knowledge toward not only Perl and C, but other C-like languages such as Java.
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