01 Php History Home

Who and Why PHP

The very rudimentary first version of PHP was released in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf in order to track visits to his online resume. Also, I don't exactly know how many coding languages use other languages to function, but PHP was written in C at this time. Anyways, PHP didn't turn into the language we know today until 1997 when Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote it to run an eCommerce site they were building. Afterwards, the ability to extend the PHP language is what made it grow in popularity.

PHP Environment

PHP is used in web development for interacting with the server. In order to use it, you can combine it with HTML code. It can run on anything these days, but it was originally created with Linux in mind. The same goes for the server. PHP was made for Apache, but it can now run on anything.

Usage of PHP

As of today, PHP is used to some degree on around 75% of sites. Honestly, outside of completely different environments like ASP.NET, PHP remains the only, or at least most popular, way to have object-based code in your web app.

Summary

Overall, PHP is still worth learning since it's still simple and widely used. One annoying thing I've run into at work is that sometimes, it will treat deprecated elements as actual errors that break an app, making version upgrades more annoying than they have to be.