research-documentation 01-php-history

PHP History

Who, and Why PHP?

Rasmus Lerdorf is considered the creator of PHP. He started working on it and used it for his sites in 1993, and officially released it to the public in 1995. PHP was originally designed to help Lerdorf maintain his personal webpage, where he used it to work with forms on websites, and communicate with databases.

PHP Environment

PHP runs primarily on a wbe server, where it communicates with other sources of information such as web forms and databases, to serve up results to a user. In addition, the PHP interpreter is located on the server, and interprets all of the PHP given to it, then sends back HTML to the user.

Usage of PHP on the Internet

PHP is widely used on the internet today to develop template systems, frameworks, and content management systems for websites. As of a recent survey, July 23rd, 2024 to be exact, PHP is used on around 76% of all websites where it was detectable.

Summary of Documentation

In summary, PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf as what started to be a personal programming language to manage his site, which was then publicly released for people to use. PHP has come a long way from then, now playing important roles in website templates and content management systems. To do this, PHP runs primarily server-side, and communicates with web forms and databases to present particular information to a user. Lastly, a large amount of websites today use PHP somewhere on their site.