PHP: "Grassroots language" challenges "big Shot" Java. Net

Grassroots PHP Language challenges the object is Java,. Net such a big shot.

Zeev The 30-year-old Israeli lad does not look like a powerful figure, but the PHP language he initiates has become a legend in the internet era. The latest news is that Sun has decided to put the free public Java source code on the agenda, and Microsoft's scripting language asp.net has been introduced free of charge. This little PHP and its associates, the open source code of Linux, Apache, and MySQL, has affected the entire web world, revolutionizing the way programs are written and published. The important thing is that PHP does not delay, while maintaining the true meaning of open source, the other side has achieved commercial success.

Just recently, Zend, a commercial company in PHP, gained 20 million dollars in investment, including Intel Capital and SAP Ventures. IBM will also work with Zend to introduce PHP to IBM's intermediate server platform to support access to the DB2 database, a transaction worth millions of of dollars. The next step for Zend is likely to be an initial public offering (IPO).

Today, there are 20 million websites in the world that use PHP, including the most popular Yahoo, Google, Baidu, YouTube, Digg, including the Lufthansa electronic booking system, Deutsche Bank's online banking, and the Wall Street Online Financial information Publishing system, Even the military system is such a diverse and demanding environment. How exactly is PHP made?

From the grassroots

As the world's most popular web application software programming language, PHP's growth process and Linux have the same wonderful. 1994, it was first created by Rasmus Lerdorf, Lerdorf just wanted to record his online resume, and later many people asked him for a copy of the program. In June 1995, Lerdorf was released in the Usenet newsgroup after adding some introductory documents, which became the first PHP 1.0.

During this period, two college students Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans need to be able to do a web-based software project, need to be able to support Linux very well, but at that time the ASP is not perfect, JSP and more complex, so chose PHP. Then they found in the work of PHP still some deficiencies, they volunteered to join the PHP language development team, and rewritten the underlying parsing engine. June 1998, the historic PHP 3.0 release, the number of users began to soar. They created the Zend Company in 1999 and developed Zend Engine, which greatly improved PHP performance.

Yahoo is one of the earliest users of PHP language, with the rise of Yahoo, a large number of sites began to learn Yahoo behind the language-php. At this point, the software began to shift from traditional mode to web-based mode, with several powerful one by one: Linux operating systems, Apache Web servers, MySQL servers, and the "P" Language (PHP, Perl, Python), which is represented in the PHP language. A German computer magazine called them the lamp (the lamp), which is also associated with the Java-EE architecture (which is the programming language, Sun Company-led). NET architecture (Microsoft Company-led) has formed the tripod trend. In a statistic from Evans data, PHP users are slightly more than Java and. NET users, but the growth rate of 2007 is expected to reach 37%, over Java's 16% and. NET's 27%, and the Burning Spark on the prairie is growing.

From revolutionaries to realists

The first of the two key secrets of PHP success is simplicity. PHP is simple enough to be ashamed of a show-off programmer, but it is ecstatic for beginners eager to enter the web development field. PHP is like a catfish that blends seamlessly with XML and WEB services. Even if the previous versions were upgraded, there was no need to worry that PHP would lose this simple feature. Undoubtedly, this feature to the need for rapid development, interactive application of the Web2.0 trend has brought great convenience, more than half of the ajax-enabled and Web2.0 sites have chosen PHP.

The second secret of PHP is "Community (powerful community)". discuz! software developer, 25-year-old Kangsheng CEO Dai Zhikang is the beneficiary of this feature. Unlike other developers, he says, a lot of PHP programs have open source code to learn, and later generations will be able to improve on their shoulders and give back to the community the results of this accumulation of knowledge. This has been likened to "cathedrals and fairs", where knowledge has been maximized, efficiency improved, errors reduced, and costs reduced. The cathedral, however, can only get higher and further delay the release time.

Now, the world has 4.5 million PHP development engineers, known as "Phper", they become one of the most influential communities in the software world. Interestingly, the wave of open source has evolved over the years and has already moved to the temples, with Intel, IBM, Oracle and even Microsoft becoming the power to preach or even dominate open source. In early November, Microsoft and Zend Company reached a long-term cooperative partnership to promote the development of PHP language.

The open source movement is more like a binder than a subversive. Liu Shouqun, chairman of China's Open source software promotion Alliance, said lamp could also derive Wamp (W for windows). In fact, PHP and. NET coexist, PHP can be bundled with Windows, there is no conflict between the two, you can use open source and closed source mixed architecture (mix).

The goal of the current PHP community and Zend Company is to extend PHP to enterprise-class applications. In this regard, Europe and North America are far ahead of China. Zend (China) Technical Support Center Director Shi Zhijun said that PHP has been in the financial, government, transportation, telecommunications, media, entertainment and other major industries have been widely used, completely divorced from a simple Network language development tool realm. In China, PHP only applies to portals and parts of professional websites, and rigorous government and financial websites are hard to see.

Even so, there is no doubt that PHP is on the rise. As Red Hat drives Linux, Zend is also trying to bring PHP into the golden Age. Zend opened a new subsidiary in Munich in 2005 and a subsidiary in France this year, and in China Zend Company established a partnership with Kangsheng and established Zend (China) Technical Support Center. A lot of young people like Shi Zhijun are joining the team, and the power around PHP is as vibrant as the language itself.

Note: PHP is an open source scripting language, mainly for Web server-side applications, for dynamic web design. PHP can be used to replace Microsoft's Asp/vbscript/jscript system, Sun's Jsp/java system, and Cgi/perl.