PHP Evolution If you’re new to PHP, here’s
PHP Evolution If you’re new to PHP, here’s a quick run down on where it’s been, where it is now, and where it’s going. PHP Past We will tersely summarize the history of PHP here, but we urge readers interested in the historical aspects of PHP development to review the introductory PHP presentations at http://conf.php.net/ or read the Brief History section in the PHP/FI 2 manual at http://php.net/docs.php. Rasmus Lerdorf conceived the idea of PHP in the fall of 1994. Version 1 of the language was implemented in early 1995 and was embraced by a handful of users, following which Version 2 was released later the same year. Versions 3 and 4 followed in 1997 and 2000 respectively. PHP Present As of the time of writing, PHP usage is growing at a rate of 15% each month, and is in use on at least seven million domains (Source: Netcraft Survey), which is about 20% of all the domains registered so far. This is a significant chunk of the market, given that these figures do not account for the multitude of installations that run on intranets and private development servers. PHP runs on 7 major platforms (stable), 10 server interfaces (stable), supports 40 stable extensions (and about as many experimental ones), and offers support to over 20 databases. These figures are testimony to the fact that PHP has grown to its current popularity based on its power and ease of use. PHP in the Ring Before we dive into cursory details of the advantages of PHP4 over PHP3, we would like to thank thousands of our readers who embraced Professional PHP Programming from Wrox (ISBN 1-861002-96-3) published in the winter of 1999. We sincerely hope that this blog will be a professional follow-up read for all the developments that have happened in the PHP world since. With PHP3, the parsing and compiling of PHP code happened simultaneously, thus reducing the basic start-up time for execution to begin. This was the main reason behind the high performance of simple scripts. Sadly, when it was burdened with the onus of handling complex scripts, there arose a redundancy in terms of parsing parts of the code over and over again, as with loops and repetitive function calls. The core engine was at fault, and so it became obvious that this was the first area to attack in the race for performance, thus instantiating the development of PHP4. At this point it would be a dereliction in our duties if we failed to mention the massive contribution from Zend to the world of PHP development. We urge you to visit http://www.zend.com/zend/whatsnew.php for details on the new features in PHP4. PHP Future The PHP4 scripting engine is a second revision of the PHP3 scripting engine, and provides more obvious infrastructure and services to the function modules, and implements the language syntax. This revised version is largely based on the same parsing rules as the PHP3 engine, thus providing good backward compatibility and migration path from PHP3 to PHP4. But the downside is the limited scope of language-level improvements, to the PHP3 mindset. With feedback from a multitude of PHP developers, Zend Technologies Ltd has embarked on a revision of the Zend Engine that will incorporate new features, improve existing ones, and provide solutions to some of the most difficult problems that PHP developers experience today. We urge you to add http://www.zend.com/zend/future.php to your list of favorites, and also subscribe to the Zend 2.0 weekly chronicle notification service at http://www.zend.com/zend/zengine/, if you are closely monitoring the PHP roadmap. Page 20
Note: If you are looking for best quality webspace to host and run your tomcat application check Vision tomcat hosting services