History and Camparison
PHP has been around since the mid-1990s. Its syntax will be familiar to you as it is similar to some of the other languages you have already studied in the program.
Table of Contents
PHP History
- 1995-97: PHP/FI 1.0-2.0 (Personal Homepage Page Tools / Forms Interpreter) - PERL scripts and C libraries developed by Rasmus Lerdorf to manage his online resume.
- 1998: PHP 3 - Major Rewrite. PHP now stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
- 1999: PHP 4 - New Zend Engine
- 2004: PHP 5 - Zend Engine 2.0 and a new object model.
- 2015: PHP 7 - 10+ years in the making! Included lots of new goodies.
- Coming Nov 2020: PHP 8!
Side note: PHP 6 never launched, although some of that work (like namespaces and traits) was back-ported into PHP 5.3/5.4 in 2009/2010.
Resources
A Short PHP Example
Here’s a short PHP program:
<?php
for ($i = 0; $i < 4; $i++) {
echo "Wello Horld!\n";
}
?>
The code looks a little bit like Java, Javascript or even C.
Note the <?php and ?> which respectively indicate the beginning and end of a section of PHP code.
Wello Horld in Java
Here is the same program written in Java.
class WelloHorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
System.out.println("Wello Horld!");
}
}
}
When compared to PHP, the Java version has some extra baggage:
- A WelloHorld class required to wrap the entire program.
- A
public static void main(String[] args)method required to wrap the mainline. System.out.prinlnvs.echo