History of php

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. It was originally designed as a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts for tracking website visitors, but it quickly evolved into a more robust scripting language.

In 1995, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote the original PHP parser and created the first version of PHP 3, which introduced several new features, including support for OOP (Object-Oriented Programming).

PHP 4 was released in 2000 and included significant improvements to the language, such as better support for OOP, better error handling, and improved performance.

In 2004, PHP 5 was released, which introduced several new features, including support for improved OOP, better XML integration, and support for SQLite databases. PHP 5 also included a new engine called Zend Engine 2, which improved performance and made it easier to create extensions for PHP.

PHP 6 was planned to be the next major version of PHP, but it was eventually abandoned due to various technical and practical issues. Some of the features that were planned for PHP 6, such as improved Unicode support, were eventually included in later versions of PHP.

Since then, PHP has continued to evolve and improve, with new versions being released regularly. The most recent stable version of PHP as of September 2021 is PHP 8.0, which includes several new features and improvements, including JIT (Just-In-Time) compilation for improved performance.