what is php? Invented a few years ago

php is a scripting language executed on the server side; PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. It was originally a simple program written in Perl language to count the number of visitors to his own website; it was later reused It is written in C language and can access the database at the same time. In 1995, PHP released the first version PHP1.

The operating environment of this tutorial: Windows 10 system, PHP version 8.1, DELL G3 computer

What is php? In what year was it invented?

PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a "hypertext preprocessor". It is a scripting language executed on the server side. It is especially suitable for Web development and can be embedded in HTML. PHP syntax learned the C language, absorbed the characteristics of multiple languages ​​​​of Java and Perl to develop its own unique syntax, and continued to improve itself based on their strengths, such as Java's object-oriented programming. The main goal of the language was originally created to make Developers quickly write high-quality web sites. PHP supports both object-oriented and process-oriented development, and is very flexible in use.

Development History

PHP is an open source software project with many developers. It was originally the abbreviation of Personal Home Page and has been officially renamed "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" ". PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. It was originally a simple program written in Perl language to count the number of visitors to his own website. Later, it was rewritten in C language and could access the database at the same time. In 1995, PHP (Personal Home Page Tools) released the first version PHP1. Since then, more and more websites have begun to use PHP and have strongly requested the addition of some features, such as loop statements and array variables. PHP2, released in 1995, added support for mySQL.

Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski discovered that PHP2 was obviously insufficient when developing e-commerce programs for a university project, so they rewrote the code and released PHP3. PHP3 is the first version similar to the syntax structure of modern PHP. The most powerful function of PHP3 is its scalability. PHP3's new functions and extensive third-party database and API support make it possible to write such programs.

Not long after PHP3 was officially released, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski began to rewrite the PHP code. The design goal is to enhance the runtime performance of complex programs and the modularity of PHP's own code. After unremitting efforts, the Zend engine was successfully developed and achieved its design goals, and PHP was introduced in mid-1999. PHP4, based on this engine and incorporating more new features, was officially released in May 2000. In addition to higher performance, PHP 4 also includes key features such as support for more web servers, HTTP Sessions support, output buffering, safer user input, and several new language constructs.

PHP5 was officially released in July 2004. Its core is the 2nd generation Zend engine (PHP7 is the 3rd generation Zend enhanced version). It introduces a new object model and a large number of new features, and begins to support object-oriented programming. After PHP6 experienced a long period of development abortion, PHP5 released 6 versions and tenaciously supported the development of the open source community. It was not until 2015-12-03 that PHP 7.0 was released. In fact, PHP5.6 already contains many PHP6 It buys valuable time for the development of PHP7. Living up to expectations, the performance of PHP7.0 has been improved by 2 times compared to PHP5.6. The successful release of PHP7 has allowed many core development members to return to the PHP community, and PHP8 was released on 2020-11-26. Compared with the PHP7 series, PHP8 adopts a more stringent verification judgment mode for various variable judgments and operations, which is beneficial to the performance optimization of JIT in subsequent versions.

PHP language, as a high-level language, is characterized by open source and belongs to the C language system in terms of design system. It allows many beginners with higher education to quickly accept and complete introductory learning. It is simple and easy to use. It’s easy to get started and find a job, so you’ll have many fans. If the amount of data is large and the access pressure is high, technical solutions such as redis, mysql table partitioning, elasticsearch search engine, message queue write protection, and PHP system distributed cluster deployment can be integrated to alleviate the problems caused by data storage, service access, and data retrieval. huge pressure.

Whether it is a large, medium or small project, PHP is a very suitable high-level programming language. Whether it is suitable depends on the mastery of the project R&D team. But for larger and more complex projects, the most common php-fpm programming model shows its weaknesses. In view of the series of shortcomings exposed by PHP-fpm, the simplest and most reliable solution is to promptly upgrade to a higher version compatible with PHP. PHP7.0.0 [14] has a performance improvement of 2 times compared to PHP5.6. In addition, the Preloading provided by PHP7.4 The preloading mechanism enables some programs to reside in memory, achieving good performance improvements. In PHP8, it also provides efficient JIT (Just-In-Time compilation) computing support. In addition, developers with higher levels can turn to the more difficult php-cli programming, which can solve most system performance problems. Both PHP7 and PHP8 support this mode of programming.

After more than 20 years of development, with the rapid development and improvement of php-cli related components, PHP can already be applied in TCP/UDP services, high-performance Web, WebSocket services, Internet of Things, real-time communication, System development in non-Web fields such as games and microservices.

According to statistics released by W3Techs on December 6, 2019, PHP’s share of programming languages ​​used on the WEB website server is as high as 78.9%. Among websites with content management systems, 58.7% use WordPress (CMS system developed by PHP), which accounts for 25.0% of all websites.

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