History of PHP: Before you can understand what PHP and PHP web hosting is, you need to have a basic understanding of who invented PHP what the features of PHP are. This article from Best PHP Web Hosting will guide you through the PHP history and the future of PHP.

PHP was invented in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf. At this time, Lerdorf had already written the original Common Gateway Interface binaries so he had a background in the web design business. When Lerdorf created PHP, or Personal Home Page, his main objective was to replace a small amount of Perl scripts that he had interfaced into his own personal website in order to analyze traffic on his site. It wasn't too long after Lerdorf created PHP that he was proclaiming it as the fastest and most user friendly tool in website development.

In the middle of 1998, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans began to rewrite the syntactic analysis of the original PHP. Their work was soon released to the public and known as PHP 3. In addition to releasing PHP 3, Suraski and Gutmans changed the language's name to recursive initialism PHP. Suraski and Gutmans didn't stop modifying PHP after the release of PHP 3. They soon began working on a new core for PHP and eventually developed the Zend Engine.

With the addition of Zend Engine 1.0, PHP 4 was released in May 2000 with great success. The success didn't stop the PHP inventors from continuing their improvement of PHP. Although it took about 4 years to release PHP 5, it was well worth the wait. PHP 5 was much improved and powered by the newly created Zend Engine II. Not only was the addition of Zend Engine II new, but PHP 5 feature several other features. Those features include a much improved support program for object oriented programming, PHP date object extensions, and many enhancements to improve the overall performance of PHP.

While PHP 5 is currently the only PHP version that is still under development, the founders of PHP released an update to PHP 4 in 2008. That update dealt with the code branch of PHP 4. This is the last update for the PHP 4 version. As mentioned earlier, PHP 5 is still being worked on. One of the PHP features that is going to be changed in the updated version of PHP 5 is the addition of late static binding. This version still won't have Unicode support, but PHP 6 should contain that. PHP 6 will also feature the removal of ereg extensions, and improved MIME support and capabilities.

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