A Brief History and Future of Structural PHP Development

The origins of PHP date back to 1994 when the language was developed to improve presentation of scripts on Internet web pages. Based upon core C-language code, PHP scripts became the most prominent application source online, adding new functionality that combined embedded HTML functions with a simplification of Perl syntax. In fact, PHP itself stands for “Personal Home Page” to reflect its initial use on websites. The development of modern PHP began in earnest in 1999 with the release of PHP 4 and the Zend Engine.

While PHP began as an ad hoc programming language modified for web use, Zend began to create PHP 4 with a focus on best practices from the ground up.  In PHP 4, coders could find extended reference types, better support for databases, improved caching and improved object-oriented organization.  With the release of version 4, PHP became a modern scripting language.

The latest modern PHP 5 version is much more of a modern object-oriented framework which makes it easier to build complete web applications. As the language matures, its origins and roots have influenced the development, along with influences from competing platforms such as Ruby and Cold Fusion. The release of PP 5 in 2004 along with a new version of the underlying Zend Engine provided important features to better incorporate SQL databases, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol for improved XML handling), caching and more flexibility to support frameworks. These improvements along with development of modern frameworks such as Zend, Code Igniter and Symfony have helped propel PHP in new directions.

The Future of PHP

While PHP 6 (and Zend Engine 3) are being designed with many backward compatibility elements, the language is headed in new directions. Led by the team at Zend Technology, the language is starting to mature into a modern application language far from its origins as a basic web page scripting tool. Overall, PHP is moving toward logical identifiers so you can understand the structure of the code by virtue of its references.

Earlier versions of PHP had an ad-hoc construction which opened security concerns (such as global variables) as well as performance considerations (with poor caching.) With PHP 6, many of these concerns are addressed directly. By giving you more control over database driven values, there is less of a threat of SQL injection attacks. Stability and security are at the core of the new PHP 6 release, which is highly anticipated and available for evaluation/deployment on existing applications to determine whether changes are required: http://snaps.php.net/

Importantly, PHP 6 offers complete Unicode semantic support which can be enabled through your core PHP configuration file. In essence, this links the language settings of PHP with a complete set of modern web development standards to allow to international language displays, proper text rendering and a standardized pattern of coding values. The UTF-8 coding standard is used to allow for complete international ASCII standards, so developers across languages and platforms will know how to work with presented language in the context of PHP.