Versions of PHP
We know that, PHP development was started by Rasmus Lerdroff in 1995. He has developed some Common Gateway Interfaces (CGI) by using C Language,which he used to maintain his personal homepage
He extended them to work with web forms and to communicate with databases, and called this implementation “Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter” or PHP/FI. By using this we can simply build dynamic web applications.
Lerdorf initially announced the release of PHP/FI as “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0” . This included Perl-like variables, form handling, and the ability to embed HTML. The syntax resembled that of Perl but was simpler, more limited and less consistent.
By adding some additional features to the existing PHP/FI and release it has Version 2.
PHP Versions 3 and 4
Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language’s name to the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. Afterwards, public testing of PHP 3 began, and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP’s core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999. They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel.
On May 22, 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. As of August 2008 this branch reached version 4.4.9. PHP 4 is no longer under development nor will any security updates be released.
PHP Version 5
On July 14, 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by the new Zend Engine II. PHP 5 included new features:
such as improved support for object-oriented programming
the PHP Data Objects (PDO) extension (which defines a lightweight and consistent interface for accessing databases),
and numerous performance enhancements
PHP 6 and Unicode
PHP received mixed reviews due to lacking native Unicode support at the core language level. In 2005, a project headed by Andrei Zmievski was initiated to bring native Unicode support throughout PHP, by embedding the International Components for Unicode (ICU) library, and representing text strings as UTF-16 internally. Since this would cause major changes both to the internals of the language and to user code, it was planned to release this as version 6.0 of the language, along with other major features then in development.
However, a shortage of developers who understood the necessary changes, and performance problems arising from conversion to and from UTF-16, which is rarely used in a web context, led to delays in the project.[36] As a result, a PHP 5.3 release was created in 2009, with many non-Unicode features back-ported from PHP 6, notably namespaces. In March 2010, the project in its current form was officially abandoned, and a PHP 5.4 release was prepared containing most remaining non-Unicode features from PHP 6, such as traits and closure re-binding. Initial hopes were that a new plan would be formed for Unicode integration, but as of 2014 none have been adopted.
