Rasmus Lerdorf— software engineer, Apache team member, and international man of mystery — is the creator and original driving force behind PHP. The first part of PHP was devel-oped for his personal use in late 1994. This was a CGI wrapper that helped him keep track of people who looked at his personal site. The next year, he put together a package called the Personal Home Page Tools (a.k.a. The PHP Construction Kit) in response to demand from users who had stumbled into his work by chance or word of mouth. Version 2 was soon released under the title PHP/FI and included the Form Interpreter, a tool for parsing SQL queries.
By the middle of 1997, PHP was being used on approximately 50,000 sites worldwide. It was clearly becoming too big for any single person to handle, even someone as focused and energetic as Rasmus. A small core development team now runs the project on the open source “benevolent junta” model, with contributions from developers and users around the world.
Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, the two Israeli programmers who developed the PHP3 and
PHP4 parsers, have also generalized and extended their work under the rubric of Zend.com
The fourth quarter of 1998 initiated a period of explosive growth for PHP, as all open source technologies enjoyed massive publicity. In October 1998, according to the best guess, just over 100,000 unique domains used PHP in some way. Just over a year later, PHP broke the one-million domain mark. When we wrote the first edition of this book in the first half of 2000, the number had increased to about two million domains. As we write this, approximately 15 million public Web servers (in the software sense, not the hardware sense) have PHP installed on them.
Public PHP deployments run the gamut from mass-market sites such as Excite Webmail and the Indianapolis 500 Web site, which serve up millions of pageviews per day, through “massniche” sites such as Sourceforge.net and Epinions.com, which tend to have higher functionality needs and hundreds of thousands of users, to e-commerce and brochureware sites such as The Bookstore at Harvard.com and Sade.com (Web home of the British singer), which must be visually attractive and easy to update. There are also PHP-enabled parts of sites, such as the forums on the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com); and a large installed base of nonpublic PHP deployments, such as LDAP directories (MCI WorldCom built one with over 100,000 entries) and trouble-ticket tracking systems.
In its newest incarnation, PHP5 strives to deliver something many users have been clamoring for over the past few years: much improved object-oriented programming (OOP) functionality. PHP has long nodded to the object programming model with functions that allow object programmers to pull out results and information in a way familiar to them. These efforts still fell short of the ideal for many programmers, however, and efforts to force PHP to build in fully object-oriented systems often yielded unintended results and hurt performance. PHP5’s newly rebuilt object model brings PHP more in line with other object-oriented languages such as Java and C++, offering support for features such as overloading, interfaces, private member variables and methods, and other standard OOP constructions.
With the crash of the dot-com bubble, PHP is poised to be used on more sites than ever.
Demand for Web-delivered functionality has decreased very little, and emerging technological standards continue to pop up all the time, but available funding for hardware, licenses, and especially headcount has drastically decreased. In the post-crash Web world, PHP’s shallow learning curve, quick implementation of new functionality, and low cost of deployment are hard arguments to beat.
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