php-doc-en/appendices/history.xml

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<appendix id="history">
 <title>History of PHP and related projects</title>
 <para>
  PHP has come a long way in the last few years.
  Growing to be one of the most prominent languages
  powering the Web was not an easy task. Those of
  you interested in briefly seeing how PHP grew out
  to what it is today, read on.
 </para>
 
 <sect1 id="history.php">
  <title>History of PHP</title>
  
  <sect2 id="history.phpfi">
   <title>PHP/FI</title>
   <para>
    PHP succeeds an older product, named PHP/FI. PHP/FI was
    created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple
    set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online
    resume. He named this set of scripts 'Personal Home Page
    Tools'. As more functionality was required, Rasmus wrote
    a much larger C implementation, which was able to
    communicate with databases, and enabled users to develop
    simple dynamic Web applications. Rasmus chose to release
    the source code for PHP/FI for everybody to see, so that
    anybody can use it, as well as fix bugs in it and improve
    the code.
   </para>
   <para>
    PHP/FI, which stood for Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter,
    included some of the basic functionality of PHP as we know
    it today. It had Perl-like variables, automatic interpretation
    of form variables and HTML embedded syntax. The syntax itself
    was similar to that of Perl, albeit much more limited, simple,
    and somewhat inconsistent.
   </para>
   <para>
    By 1997, PHP/FI 2.0, the second write-up of the C implementation,
    had a cult of several thousand users around the world
    (estimated), with approximately 50,000 domains reporting as
    having it installed, accounting for about 1% of the domains
    on the Internet. While there were several people contributing
    bits of code to this project, it was still at large a one-man
    project.
   </para>
   <para>
    PHP/FI 2.0 was officially released only in November 1997, after
    spending most of its life in beta releases. It was shortly
    afterwards succeeded by the first alphas of PHP 3.0.
   </para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="history.php3">
   <title>PHP 3</title>
   <para>
    PHP 3.0 was the first version that closely resembles PHP as
    we know it today. It was created by Andi Gutmans and Zeev
    Suraski in 1997 as a complete rewrite, after they found
    PHP/FI 2.0 severely underpowered for developing their own
    eCommerce application. In an effort to cooperate and start
    building upon PHP/FI's existing user-base, Andi, Rasmus and
    Zeev decided to cooperate and announce PHP 3.0 as the official
    successor of PHP/FI 2.0, and development of PHP/FI 2.0 was
    mostly halted.
   </para>
   <para>
    One of the biggest strengths of PHP 3.0 was its strong
    extensibility features. In addition to providing end users
    with a solid infrastructure for lots of different databases,
    protocols and APIs, PHP 3.0's extensibility features attracted
    dozens of developers to join in and submit new extension
    modules. Arguably, this was the key to PHP 3.0's tremendous
    success. Other key features introduced in PHP 3.0 were the
    object oriented syntax support and the much more powerful
    and consistent language syntax.
   </para>
   <para>
    The whole new language was released under a new name, that
    removed the implication of limited personal use that the
    PHP/FI 2.0 name held. It was named plain 'PHP', with the
    meaning being a recursive acronym - PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
   </para>
   <para>
    By the end of 1998, PHP grew to an install base of tens of
    thousands of users (estimated) and hundreds of thousands of
    Web sites reporting it installed. At its peak, PHP 3.0 was
    installed on approximately 10% of the Web servers on the
    Internet.
   </para>
   <para>
    PHP 3.0 was officially released in June 1998, after having
    spent about 9 months in public testing.
   </para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="history.php4">
   <title>PHP 4</title>
   <para>
    By the winter of 1998, shortly after PHP 3.0 was officially
    released, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski had begun working
    on a rewrite of PHP's core. The design goals were to improve
    performance of complex applications, and improve the
    modularity of PHP's code base. Such applications were made
    possible by PHP 3.0's new features and support for a wide
    variety of third party databases and APIs, but PHP 3.0 was
    not designed to handle such complex applications efficiently.
   </para>
   <para>
    The new engine, dubbed 'Zend Engine' (comprised of their
    first names, Zeev and Andi), met these design goals
    successfully, and was first introduced in mid 1999. PHP 4.0,
    based on this engine, and coupled with a wide range of
    additional new features, was officially released in May
    2000, almost two years after its predecessor, PHP 3.0.
    In addition to the highly improved performance of this
    version, PHP 4.0 included other key features such as
    support for many more Web servers, HTTP sessions, output
    buffering, more secure ways of handling user input and
    several new language constructs.
   </para>
   <para>
    PHP 4 is currently the latest released version of PHP. Work
    has already begun on modifying and improving the Zend Engine
    to integrate the features which were designed for PHP 5.0.
   </para>
   <para>
    Today, PHP is being used by hundreds of thousands of developers
    (estimated), and several million sites report as having it
    installed, which accounts for over 20% of the domains on the
    Internet.
   </para>
   <para>
    PHP's development team includes dozens of developers, as well
    as dozens others working on PHP-related projects such as PEAR
    and the documentation project.
   </para>
  </sect2>
 </sect1>
 
 <sect1 id="history.php.related">
  <title>History of PHP related projects</title>
  
  <!-- Hope Stig and/or Egon can do this
  
  <sect2 id="history.phpdoc">
   <title>PHP Documentation Project</title>
   <para>
   </para>
  </sect2>
  
  -->

  <sect2 id="history.pear">
   <title>PEAR</title>
   <para>
    PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository (originally,
    PHP Extension and Add-on Repository) is PHP's version of
    foundation classes, and may grow in the future to be one
    of the key ways to distribute both PHP and C-based PHP
    extensions among developers.
   </para>
   <para>
    PEAR was born in discussions held in the PHP Developers'
    Meeting (PDM) held in January 2000 in Tel Aviv. It was
    created by Stig S. Bakken, and is dedicated to his first-born
    daughter, Malin Bakken.
   </para>
   <para>
    Since early 2000, PEAR has grown to be a big, significant
    project with a large number of developers working on
    implementing common, reusable functionality for the
    benefit of the entire PHP community. PEAR today includes
    a wide variety of infrastructure foundation classes
    for database access, content caching, mathematical
    calculations, eCommerce and much more.
   </para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="history.phpqa">
   <title>PHP Quality Assurance Initiative</title>
   <para>
    The PHP Quality Assurance Initiative was set up in the
    summer of 2000 in response to criticism that PHP releases
    were not being tested well enough for production
    environments. The team now consists of a core group of
    developers with a good understanding of the PHP code
    base. These developers spend a lot of their time
    localizing and fixing bugs within PHP. In addition
    there are many other team members who test and
    provide feedback on these fixes using a wide variety
    of platforms.
   </para>
  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="history.phpgtk">
   <title>PHP-GTK</title>
   <para>
    PHP-GTK is the PHP solution for writing client side
    GUI applications. Andrei Zmievski remembers the planing
    and creation process of PHP-GTK:
   </para>
   <blockquote>
    <para>
     GUI programming has always been of my interests, and I found
     that Gtk+ is a very nice toolkit, except that programming with
     it in C is somewhat tedious. After witnessing PyGtk and GTK-Perl
     implementations, I decided to see if PHP could be made to
     interface with Gtk+, even minimally. Starting in August of 2000,
     I began to have a bit more free time so that is when I started
     experimenting. My main guideline was the PyGtk implementation
     as it was fairly feature complete and had a nice object-oriented
     interface. James Henstridge, the author of PyGtk, provided very
     helpful advice during those initial stages.
    </para>
    <para>
     Hand-writing the interfaces to all the Gtk+ functions was out of
     the question, so I seized upon the idea of code-generator, similar
     to how PyGtk did it. The code generator is a PHP program that reads
     a set of .defs file containing the Gtk+ classes, constants, and
     methods information and generates C code that interfaces PHP with
     them. What cannot be generated automatically can be written by
     hand in .overrides file.
    </para>
    <para>
     Working on the code generator and the infrastructure took some
     time, because I could spend little time on PHP-GTK during the
     fall of 2000. After I showed PHP-GTK to Frank Kromann, he got
     interested and started helping me out with code generator work
     and Win32 implementation. When we wrote the first Hello World
     program and fired it up, it was extremely exciting. It took a
     couple more months to get the project to a presentable condition
     and the initial version was released on March 1, 2001. The
     story promptly hit SlashDot.
    </para>
    <para>
     Sensing that PHP-GTK might be extensive, I set up separate
     mailing lists and CVS repositories for it, as well as the
     gtk.php.net website with the help of Colin Viebrock. The
     documentation would also need to be done and James Moore
     came in to help with that.
    </para>
    <para>
     Since its release PHP-GTK has been gaining popularity. We
     have our own documentation team, the manual keeps improving,
     people start writing extensions for PHP-GTK, and more and
     more exciting applications with it.
    </para>
   </blockquote>
  </sect2>
 </sect1>

 <sect1 id="history.php.books">
  <title>Books about PHP</title>
  <para>
   As PHP grew, it began to be recognized as a world-wide popular
   development platform. One of the most interesting ways of
   seeing this trend was by observing the books about PHP that
   came out throughout the years.
  </para>
  <para>
   To the best of our knowledge, the first book dedicated to
   PHP was 'php- dynamische webauftritte professionell realisieren'
   - a German book published in 1999, authored by Egon Schmid,
   Christian Cartus and Richard Blume. The first book in English
   about PHP was published shortly afterwards, and was 'Core
   PHP Programming' by Leon Atkinson. Both of these books covered
   PHP 3.0.
  </para>
  <para>
   While these two books were the first of their kind - they were
   followed by a large number of books from a host of authors and
   publishers. There are over 40 books in English, 50 books in
   German, and over 20 books in French! In addition, you can find
   books about PHP in many other languages, including Spanish,
   Korean, Japanese and Hebrew.
  </para>
  <para>
   Clearly, this large number of books, written by different
   authors, published by many publishers, and their availability
   in so many languages - are a strong testimony for PHP's
   world-wide success.
  </para>
 </sect1>
 
 <sect1 id="history.php.publications">
  <title>Publications about PHP</title>
  <para>
   To the best of our knowledge, the first article about PHP in
   a hard-copy magazine was published in the French Informatiques
   Magazine, towards the end of 1998, and covered PHP 3.0. As with
   books, this was the first in a series of many articles published
   about PHP in various prominent magazines.
  </para>
  <para>
   Articles about PHP appeared in Dr. Dobbs, Linux Enterprise,
   Linux Magazine and many more. Articles about migrating ASP-based
   applications to PHP under Windows even appear on Microsoft's
   very own MSDN!
  </para>
 </sect1>

</appendix>

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