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Unit 5: PHP

in stand alone graphical applications. PHP can be deployed on most web servers and as a stand Notes
alone interpreter, on almost every operating system and platform free of charge PHP is installed
on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers.

PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. The main implementation of PHP is
now produced by The PHP Group and serves as the de facto standard for PHP as there is no
formal specification. PHP is free software released under the PHP License; it is incompatible with
the GNU General Public License (GPL) due to restrictions on the usage of the term PHP While
PHP originally stood for ”Personal Home Page”, it is now said to stand for ”PHP: Hypertext
Preprocessor ”, a recursive acronym.

5.1 Versions of PHP

Major Minor Release
version version date

1 1.0.0 1995-06-08 Officially called ”Personal Home Page Tools (PHP
Tools)”. This is the first use of the name “PHP”.
2 2.0.0 1997-11-01 Considered by its creator as the ”fastest and simplest
tool” for creating dynamic web pages.
3 3.0.0 1998-06-06 Development moves from one person to multiple
developers. Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrite
the base for this version.

4 4.0.0 2000-05-22 Added more advanced two-stage parse/execute tag-
parsing system called the Zend engine.

4.1.0 2001-12-10 Introduced ‘superglobals’ ($_GET, $_POST, $_SESSION,
etc.)
4.2.0 2002-04-22 Disabled register_globals by default. Data received
over the network is not inserted directly into the global
namespace anymore, closing possible security holes in
applications.
4.3.0 2002-12-27 Introduced the CLI, in addition to the CGI.

4.4.0 2005-07-11 Added man pages for phpize and php-config scripts.
4.4.9 2008-08-07 Security enhancements and bug fixes. The last release
of the PHP 4.4 series.

5 5.0.0 2004-07-13 Zend Engine II with a new object model.

5.1.0 2005-11-24 Performance improvements with introduction of
compiler variables in re-engineered PHP Engine.

5.2.0 2006-11-02 Enabled the filter extension by default. Native JSON
support.
5.2.17 2011-01-06 Fix of critical vulnerability connected to floating point.
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