What is PHP

PHP is a great scripting language that can be used to create amazing forms, features, and functions on your website. PHP is a widely used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. It generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output. It can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. PHP is installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers. The most recent major release of PHP was version 5.2.6 on May 1, 2008.

PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page.It began in 1994 as a set of Common Gateway Interface binaries written in the C programming language by the Danish/Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf. Lerdorf initially created these Personal Home Page Tools to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage.
Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two Israeli developers at the Technion IIT, rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive initialism PHP:Hypertext Preprocessor.PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released.PHP 5 included new features such as improved support for object-oriented programmingIn 2008, PHP 5 became the only stable version under development. Late static binding has been missing from PHP and will be added in version 5.3.PHP 6 is under development alongside PHP 5. Major changes include the removal of register_globals, magic quotes, and safe mode.PHP does not have complete native support for Unicode or multibyte strings; unicode support will be included in PHP 6.