What is PHP Full Form?

Hypertext Preprocessor (earlier called, Personal Home Page)

PHP is a general purpose scripting language aimed at web development.[8] It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. PHP was originally an abbreviation for personal home page, but today it stands for PHP's recursive initialism: hypertext preprocessor.

On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code, which can be any data type, such as B. generated HTML or binary image data, form an HTTP response in whole or in part.

There are various web template systems, web content management systems, and web frameworks that can be deployed to orchestrate or facilitate the generation of this response. for standalone graphical applications and the control of robotic drones. PHP code can also be run directly from the command line.

PHP has been widely ported and can be implemented on most web servers on a variety of operating systems and platforms.

Since 2014, work has continued to create a formal PHP specification.

It is also reported that only 8% of PHP users are using the currently supported 8.x versions. Most are using unsupported PHP 7, specifically 7.4, and even PHP 5 has a 23% usage, is also not supported by security updates and is known to have serious security vulnerabilities.

PHP development began in 1993 when Rasmus Lerdorf wrote several CGI (Common Gateway Interface) programs in C to maintain his personal home page. He extended it to work with web forms and communicate with databases, calling this implementation the "Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter" or PHP/FI.

PHP/FI could be used to build simple and dynamic web applications. To speed up bug reporting and improve the code, Lerdorf first announced the release of PHP/FI as "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) Version 1.0" on the usenet discussion group comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi am The June 8, 1995 version already had the basic functionality that PHP has today. These included Perl-like variables, form handling, and the ability to embed HTML. The syntax was similar to Perl, but simpler, more restricted, and less consistent.

Not intended as a new programming language, early PHP grew organically, with Lerdorf stating in retrospect, "I don't know how to stop, there was never any intention of writing a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea, how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step along the way." A development team was assembled and after months of work and beta testing, PHP/FI 2 was officially released in November 1997.

The fact that PHP was not originally designed but developed organically has led to inconsistent function naming and an inconsistent ordering of its parameters. In some cases, the function names were chosen to match the sub-libraries that PHP "packaged" while in some very early versions of PHP the length of the function names was hashed internally, i.e. the names were chosen to match the improve distribution of hash values.

ZeevSuraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the basis of PHP 3, renaming the language to the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP 3 then began public testing, and the official release was in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans began rewriting the PHP core and in 1999 produced the Zend engine.

PHP 4 was released on May 22, 2000, powered by Zend Engine 1.0.