PHP

"PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor"

PHP, which is the acronym for Hypertext Preprocessor, is a server-side scripting language that is used in building web applications. It is one of the most popular open-source programming languages. This means that it is open, accessible, and freely distributed with licenses not restricting its integration with other software. 

History of PHP

PHP was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 as a tool for managing his online profile. He wrote it in the C programming language. Based on its originally intended purpose, he named it Personal Home Page (PHP). Lerdorf later combined it with his Form Interpreter to come up with PHP/FI in 1985. After slight remodelling by other developers, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, an updated PHP/FI 2 emerged. In 1998, it was further developed to PHP 3 which saw a massive adoption of the language.

PHP 4 was released in May 2000 and had a reworked core called the Zend Engine 1.0. The update brought about a significant boost in PHP’s speed and reliability. Aspects such as object-orientation, the Boolean type, and COM support also evolved. The consequent instalments of the software, version 4 and 5, were released in 2004 and 2006 respectively. Currently, it has reached version 7, which was released in November 2017.

Who Uses PHP?

Today, PHP has become ubiquitous with several reputable websites running on PHP code. Despite being wrongfully termed as a poor language by some elite programmers, sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr, Yahoo, Tumblr, WordPress, and Istockphoto have used it successfully. It has become more powerful and holds approximately 79.1% market share as a server-side language. 

Pros and Cons of the PHP technology

Pros

• It is fast and easy to use 
• It is used by a large number of people, therefore solutions to most development problems are available. 
• It integrates well with databases, file systems, and images 
• Its garbage collection method is dynamic as it uses arrays 
• It has a low barrier to entry 
• It is secure

Cons 

• It is an interpreted language compiled down to Opcode 
• It uses threaded executors, which brings about scalability issues 
• The quality of its frameworks differs due to the fact that they are free 
• It is difficult to modify code behaviour 

PHP is quite dynamic. It works well with other scripting languages such as HTML and is compatible with a wide variety of databases used for hosting services. Overall, it is cheap, secure, fast, and reliable making it a great option for web hosting and application development.