Chapter 1. Ecosystem Overview

It has been more than two decades now since the birth of PHP. Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, the PHP acronym initially stood for Personal Home Page. Back then, PHP was merely a few Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs in C, used to power a simple web page.

Though PHP was not intended to be a new programming language, the idea caught on. During the late nineties Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, co-founders of Zend Technologies, continued the work on PHP by rewriting its entire parser, giving birth to PHP 3. The PHP language name acronym now stood for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

PHP positions itself among the top ten programming languages in the world. According to TIOBE, the software quality company, it currently holds sixth place. For the last decade, especially since the release of PHP 5 in July 2004, PHP has been recognized as the popular solution for building web applications.

Though PHP still presents itself as a scripting language, it's safe to say that as of PHP 5 it is far more than that. Some of the world web's most popular platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Magento, and PrestaShop are built in PHP. It is projects like these that played a role in further raising the popularity of PHP. Some of them stretch the boundaries of PHP by implementing complex OOP (Object Oriented Programming) design patterns found in other programming languages like Java, C#, and their frameworks.

Even though PHP 5 had decent OOP support, lots of things were still left to be dreamed of. Work on PHP 6 was planned to give more support for the PHP Unicode strings. Sadly, its development came to a halt and PHP 6 was canceled in 2010.

That same year, Facebook announced its HipHop compiler. Their compiler was converting PHP code into C++ code. The C++ code was further compiled into native machine code via a C++ compiler. This concept brought major performance improvements for PHP. However, this approach was not very practical, because it took too long to compile PHP scripts all the way to native machine code.

Shortly after, Dmitry Stogov, Zend Technologies Chief Performance Engineer, announced a project called PHPNG, which became the basis for the next PHP version, PHP 7.

In Dec 2015, PHP 7 was released, bringing numerous improvements and new features:

• New version of the Zend Engine
• Improved performance (twice as fast as PHP 5.6)
• Significantly reduced memory usage
• Abstract Syntax Tree
• Consistent 64-bit support
• Improved exception hierarchy
• Many fatal errors converted to exceptions
• Secure random number generator
• Removed old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions
• The null coalescing operator
• Return and Scalar type declarations
• Anonymous classes
• Zero cost asserts

In this chapter, we will look at the following topics:

• Getting ready for PHP 7
• Frameworks