PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor ) was released in the 1995.

PHP was originally known as Personal Home Page written as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) in C Language by Danish/Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf.

Lerdorf initially created these Personal Home Page Tools to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage and was originally designed to replace a set of Perl scripts to maintain his Personal Home Pages (also known as PHP) in 1994.

He combined these with his Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI, which had more functionality. PHP/FI included a larger implementation for the C programming language and could communicate with databases, enabling the building of simple, dynamic web applications.

Lerdorf released PHP publicly on June 8, 1995 to accelerate bug location and improve the code.This release was named PHP version 2 and already had the basic functionality that programming php has today.

Mainly , PHP was designed to create dynamic and more interactive web pages. It is a server-side scripting language embed with HTML. Now a days , it is the most widely-used open-source and general-purpose scripting language.

PHP code in a script can interect with databases, create images, read and write files and talk to remote servers. So the output from PHP code is combined with HTML in script and the result is sent to the user as a web page.

PHP versions till date (php info):

PHP 2 starting from 1995

PHP 3.0.0 to 3.0.17 starting from 1997

PHP 4.0.0 to 4.0.6 , 4.1.0 to 4.1.2 , 4.2.0 to 4.2.3 , 4.3.0 to 4.3.11 , 4.4.0 to 4.4.9 starting from 2000

PHP 5.0.0 to 5.0.5 , 5.1.0 to 5.1.6 , 5.2.0 to 5.2.11 , 5. 3.1 starting from 2004

PHP 6.0.0

All major operating systems including Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and RISC OS , you can use PHP in all these operating systems. As you know there are procedural programming or object oriented programming.

PHP uses either procedural programming or object oriented programming. Also you can mix them and use both ( procedural programming or object oriented programming ).

As i mention above, PHP is used mainly in server-side scripting, command line interface and writing desktop applications.

PHP also supports ODBC, the Open Database Connection standard which allows you to connect to other databases supporting this world standard.

For database , phpMyAdmin is most widely used for PHP developement. Server-side scripting is the most traditional one for PHP development.

In order to use PHP for server-side scripting you need

1. PHP parser

2. Web server

3. Web browser.

The PHP codes entered with the parser on a web server will be translated into a PHP page that can be viewed on your web browser.

Main reason behind popularity of PHP language is , it can be embedded directly into HTML coding.

It has more benefits such as the following

1. It can be used on all major operating systems.

2. It can be supported by most of the web servers.

3. The latest version of PHP development is a very stable and grown-up language used for web programming like Java and C#.

 PHP is fast because the time needed to process and load a webpage is relatively low. PHP is also versatile and it runs on a wide variety of operating systems.

PHP hosting is a server-side scripting environment that is used to create dynamic web pages. It is an open source language which is widely used by programmers and web developers.

Open source gives a lot of advantages over proprietary programming languages. Due to this reason, PHP has been the one of the most popular server-side scripting language so far. Almost all the hosting providers offer PHP hosting services these days. PHP is especially strong in relational databases, which are used for dynamic content and e-commerce applications.