Discuss which version of PHP became popular

PHP is a popular web development language that is widely used in Internet application development. The history of PHP can be traced back to the early 1990s. With the development of the Internet, PHP has gradually become a popular programming language. So, in which version did PHP become popular? This article will unravel this mystery for you.

History of PHP

The full name of PHP is Hypertext Preprocessor (Hypertext Preprocessor), which was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 and named Personal Home Page (Personal Home Page). At this time, PHP was still a simple CGI script language, and its main function was to process web requests by parsing HTML code on the server side.

In 1995, Rasmus Lerdorf released PHP to the public and open sourced the relevant code, which marked that PHP officially became an open source programming language. At the same time, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans began to improve the core of PHP and added some new features, such as support for object-oriented programming.

In 1997, Suraski and Gutmans released PHP3, a PHP distribution with more complete object-oriented programming support and new language features. This is also the starting point for PHP to be widely used in web programming.

Then, in 2000, PHP4 was released, which introduced the Zend engine, which greatly improved the operating efficiency of PHP. At the same time, PHP4 also has more complete language features and library functions than before, which makes PHP a quite mature web development language.

Released in 2004, PHP5 continues to build on the foundation of PHP4 and introduces many important new features such as exception handling, visibility, interfaces, and namespaces. These new features make PHP5 a more powerful and flexible programming language, and it is also widely used in the development of large-scale web applications. At the same time, PHP5 also introduced Zend Engine II and had a more rigorous object model and API.

Versions of PHP

So far, PHP can be traced back to many different versions. Here is a timeline of major releases:

• PHP/FI (1994)
• PHP2 (1995)
• PHP3 (1997)
• PHP4 (2000)
• PHP5 (2004)
• PHP7 (2015)
• PHP8 (2020)

As you can see from the timeline above Well, the earliest version of PHP was released in 1994. However, PHP at that time was just a simple CGI scripting language and did not become a formal programming language. In fact, PHP really started to become popular after the release of PHP3. Therefore, it can be said that PHP3 is the starting point for PHP to become popular.

Conclusion

Although the history of PHP can be traced back to the early 1990s, it did not really start to gain popularity until the release of PHP3. PHP3 introduces many new features and functionality and is supported by a wide range of applications and developers. From this perspective, it can be said that PHP3 is the starting point for PHP to become a popular programming language. Since then, PHP has continued to evolve and improve, introducing a host of new features and functionality, becoming a programming language widely used in web development.

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