PHP in Website Development Era

PHP has an unique place in website development. It was introduced at a right time when web based business were in new trend. Soon it became one of the heavily used language for creating online applications. Few basic reasons are,

• simple language structure
• easy installation procedure
• clean documentation
• free license.

Apart from the above, PHP has its unique features that leads more popularity. Since 1994 when  PHP development was started, it has migrated over several versions.

PHP Versions

Versions	Features	Description
PHP/FI (1995)	Form handling	Perl/CGI script (PHP 1.0) introduced byRasmus Lerdorf. The Expansion  is Personal Home Page / Form Interpreter.
PHP/FI2 (1997)	Data conversion Form data export	With slight modifications in Form Interpreter(PHP 2.0) to handle form entries.
PHP  3 – (1998)	PHP core is rewritten PHP parser is rewritten. Zend Engine is incorporated.	Language core was changed by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans and PHP refers to PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
PHP 4 – (2000)	Object-Oriented support External resource handling Security RegEx handling	With features for supporting enterprise-oriented applications.
PHP 5 – (2004)	Improved object model PDO Support Exception handling XML support	PHP core was almost stabilized with this release. Later 5.X releases has slight enhancement.

Note: 

The development team is processing upon version 6 to provide Unicode support via PHP. 

PHP Web Constellations

PHP is one of the best choice for creating web applications. Because it supports advanced web constellations. It supports most of the popular databases, libraries. PHP script can be embedded  with hypertext and client-side script.

With these collective integration, PHP as an open-source attracts people in web development businesses. Currently, most renowned websites are using PHP. For example, Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and more.  As per 2013 metrics made by online research agencies like Netcraft, more than 200 million websites is using PHP