From the grassroots to the big shot PHP technology development process

In the last ten years of last century, was the Web application from the birth to the most important 10 years of maturity. In 1990, the world's first Web server was born, in 1991, the world's first web browser was born. Over the next few years, the scale of Web applications has grown as the level of computer hardware improves. In the meantime, a lot of web development language was born, in which PHP is a more outstanding web development language. Does the birth of PHP mean that web apps will move into a new era? Can it withstand the attack of other web development languages?

　　PHP was born

In 1994, Rasmus Lerdorf first designed the PHP programming language. In June 1995, Rasmus Lerdorf published a PHP 1.0 statement on Usenet newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi. In this earlier version, simple features such as guest message book, visitor counter, etc. were provided. In 1995 years, the second edition of PHP asked the city, named Php/fi (Form interpreter). In this release, a parser that can handle more complex embedded tag languages is added. It has since laid the influence of PHP on dynamic web development.

Since PHP has added these powerful features, its usage has soared. According to preliminary statistics, at the end of 1996, 15,000 Web sites used Php/fi, and in the middle of 1997 this figure exceeded 50,000.

The success of the first two versions has made PHP designers and users confident about the future of PHP. In 1997, the PHP development team joined the Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans (two people and Rasmus Lerdorf and the three founders of PHP) who volunteered to rewrite the underlying parsing engine. Many other people have volunteered to join the rest of the PHP business, and PHP has become a real open source project. In June 1998, Php.net released the PHP 3.0 statement. In this version, PHP can be tightly integrated with the Apache server, coupled with its constant updating and adding new features, and it supports almost all mainstream and Non-mainstream databases, and it has a very high execution efficiency, which makes the 1999-year Web site that uses PHP more than 150,000!

PHP has evolved over 3 versions and has become a very powerful web development language. This language is very easy to use, and it has a powerful class library, and the class library naming rules are very normative, even if the function of some functions do not know, can also be guessed by the function name. This makes PHP very easy to learn, and PHP programs can be handled directly using the HTML editor, so PHP became very popular after 1998 years, and many large portals (such as Sina) used PHP as their own web development language.

　　In the face of pressure, courage

There will never be a single choice in this pluralistic world. In the subsequent years of the birth of PHP, Web applications were gradually recognized by the majority of users. In the meantime, some PHP-like web development languages were born, the most famous of which are ASP and JSP (ASP and JSP, unlike PHP, which are not languages themselves, but a web development technology that ASP can develop using JScript or VBScript, JSP can only be developed using Java. ASP was born in 1996, the second year when Microsoft's former CEO Bill Gates announced the addition of Microsoft's products to the Internet. Although ASP can only run on the Windows platform, but thanks to Microsoft's strong support and ASP's easy to use, so that this technology gradually from the hands of PHP grabbed a large number of users. In 1998, the birth of JSP has a strong momentum. Because JSP has almost the same advantage as PHP, and the JSP is running on the JVM, it is theoretically more efficient than PHP. With the advent of both technologies, PHP is being hit on both sides.

However, PHP also not to be outdone, after continuous improvement, finally in May 2000 launched a landmark version, PHP4. This version uses the Zend (Zeev + Andi) engine, provides higher performance, and includes other key features, such as support for more WEB servers; HTTP Sessions support; output caching (buffering), a more secure way to handle user input, and some new language constructs.

However, the competition of web development language has changed a little since 21st century. Although ASP has won some users in the beginning, because the ASP's development language is JScript and VBScript, it lacks a class library as powerful as PHP and JSP, although ASP can make up for this disadvantage by invoking COM components, but this will be very troublesome. While JSP has a powerful class library, but also cross-platform, but because the Java language is a strongly typed language, and JSP definition of tag and other specifications are too complex, which makes JSP more complex to use than PHP. As a result, PHP has been a bit more competitive in the Web over the last century. But after 21st century, the situation became even more complicated.

　　The wings have been abundant, tripod

Because of the ASP and JSP some of the deficiencies, so that PHP has an opportunity. But this does not mean that PHP's future will be smooth sailing. The ASP's market is now fading, but its successor, ASP.net, is grabbing the web-development market with unprecedented momentum. And the disadvantage of ASP is just the advantage of asp.net. Since asp.net can theoretically be developed using any language based on the. NET Framework, it also has a powerful class library based on the. NET Framework. and Sun's JSP is not to be outdone, because the JSP is more complex to use, therefore, Sun also introduced to simplify the development of JSF (for the development of the front-end interface, JSP+JSF equivalent to asp.net). This makes PHP face an unprecedented test.

Because PHP is open source and follows the GNU GPL, it supports and makes its participants all over the world. And after the efforts of all parties, PHP finally launched in 2004 PHP5, the PHP version of the previous version of the milestone-type improvement. And this version of PHP's biggest contribution is to improve its object-oriented model. Although Object-oriented is also supported in previous versions of PHP, the object-oriented model is not perfect, such as no constructors, destructors, abstract classes and other object-oriented features. These features have been perfected in the PHP5. PHP5 also made a lot of improvements in the database, such as providing a new database interface for access to MySQL mysqli, and in PHP5, the new features of MySQL, such as object-oriented interfaces and preprocessing statements (Prepared Statement), are also available. In addition, PHP5.0 is also bundled with small capacity rdbms--sqlite.

and PHP-related products have sprung up. In particular, free and commercial Web applications based on PHP are being used in large numbers in China.

Let's take a look at the forums that are often used in Web applications. At present in the domestic very popular forum main 3, they are discuz,phpwind,molyx. These 3 forums are heavily used in many personal and commercial websites in the country. In the field of PHP forum has formed a tripod situation. And with the popularity of Web2.0, they also gradually added a blog and other new functions.

Along with the renewal of the Forum program, the domestic PHP CMS development more quickly. In recent years, a lot of PHP-based article publishing systems have sprung up. At the beginning of 2004 there was a phparticle system, but because of its slow update, the user gradually lost confidence in it. But at the same time 2004 is also the fastest development of PHP CMS, the old Inews also began to surface, 3.0 jumped to 4.0. April 2004, known as "the strongest CMS in China": ICMs began to publicize the trend, so many people flock to. There are other PHP news systems in the year, such as beaucoup cms,9466article, Iceberg CMS, and so on.

At the same time, the world's leading PHP technology leader Zend Technology company also announced that the company in the series D round of financing to obtain 20 million U.S. dollars investment. This round of investment is led by Greylock and is the first time the company invests Zend.

This new investment enables Zend to expand markets in emerging regions faster, accelerate product development and expand service systems to meet the needs of growing enterprise-class PHP customers. As the two co-founder of Zend Technology, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski said, "It is a great honor for venture capital company Greylock Partners to value the development potential of Zend and to share the growth of the PHP market." ”

Zend is the most typical representative of the success of PHP in business, creating open source paths that have far-reaching implications for modern web applications. Worldwide, there are more than 20 million dynamic sites using PHP, including Yahoo! and other famous sites, currently more than half of the ajax-enabled and Web2.0 site to choose to apply PHP. In addition, PHP is the enterprise used to build service-oriented, creative and hybrid Web services into a new generation of integrated business applications of the language, become open source business application development direction.

Since PHP5 was launched in 2004, PHP has become a favorite of enterprise-class Web applications. At the same time and ASP.net and the new version of JSP formed a tripod situation. This is probably what most PHP users want to see. The power of PHP is obvious to all. But it also has some disadvantages, such as providing too many functions and classes, which makes it very complicated, which is why many development languages start well, but later become difficult to learn. and PHP in the visual development of the line, this point asp.net done very well, currently may only asp.net can do this. If PHP provides the IDE for visual development, it's going to be a brighter future. Hopefully in the future PHP will be some time in these areas, after all, ease of use is one of the biggest selling point of the language.