goba Sat Dec 15 11:32:14 2001 EDT
Modified files:
/phpdoc/en/appendices history.xml
Log:
Finaly fill this file with some detailed history
text written by Zeev Zuraski. PHPDOC and PHP-GTK parts
are there to be done by some volunteers :)
Index: phpdoc/en/appendices/history.xml
diff -u phpdoc/en/appendices/history.xml:1.7 phpdoc/en/appendices/history.xml:1.8
--- phpdoc/en/appendices/history.xml:1.7 Wed Dec 12 15:46:26 2001
+++ phpdoc/en/appendices/history.xml Sat Dec 15 11:32:13 2001
@@ -1,14 +1,256 @@
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
-<!-- $Revision: 1.7 $ -->
+<!-- $Revision: 1.8 $ -->
-<!--
+<appendix id="history">
+ <title>History of PHP and related projects</title>
+ <para>
+ PHP has come a long way in the last few years.
+ Growing to be one of the most prominent languages
+ powering the Web was not an easy task. Those of
+ you interested in briefly seeing how PHP grew out
+ to what it is today, read on.
+ </para>
+
+ <sect1 id="history.php">
+ <title>History of PHP</title>
+
+ <sect2 id="history.phpfi">
+ <title>PHP/FI</title>
+ <para>
+ PHP succeeds an older product, named PHP/FI. PHP/FI was
+ created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple
+ set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online
+ resume. He named this set of scripts 'Personal Home Page
+ Tools'. As more functionality was required, Rasmus wrote
+ a much larger C implementation, which was able to
+ communicate with databases, and enabled users to develop
+ simple dynamic Web applications. Rasmus chose to release
+ the source code for PHP/FI for everybody to see, so that
+ anybody can use it, as well as fix bugs in it and improve
+ it.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ PHP/FI, which stood for Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter,
+ included some of the basic functionality of PHP as we know
+ it today. It had Perl-like variables, automatic interpretation
+ of form variables and HTML embedded syntax. The syntax itself
+ was similar to that of Perl, albeit much more limited, simple,
+ and somewhat inconsistent.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ By 1997, PHP/FI 2.0, the second write-up of the C implementation,
+ had a cult of several thousand users around the world
+ (estimated), with approximately 50,000 domains reporting as
+ having it installed, accounting for about 1% of the domains
+ on the Internet. While there were several people contributing
+ bits of code to this project, it was still at large a one-man
+ project.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ PHP/FI 2.0 was officially released only in November 1997, after
+ spending most of its life in beta releases. It was shortly
+ afterwards succeeded by the first alphas of PHP 3.0.
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
- This is a first draft, currently, nobody is working on it
+ <sect2 id="history.php3">
+ <title>PHP 3</title>
+ <para>
+ PHP 3.0 was the first version that closely resembles PHP as
+ we know it today. It was created by Andi Gutmans and Zeev
+ Suraski in 1997 as a complete rewrite, after they found
+ PHP/FI 2.0 severely underpowered for developing their own
+ eCommerce application. In an effort to cooperate and start
+ building upon PHP/FI's existing user-base, Andi, Rasmus and
+ Zeev decided to cooperate and announce PHP 3.0 as the official
+ successor of PHP/FI 2.0, and development of PHP/FI 2.0 was
+ mostly halted.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ One of the biggest strengths of PHP 3.0 was its strong
+ extensibility features. In addition to providing end users
+ with a solid infrastructure for lots of different databases,
+ protocols and APIs, PHP 3.0's extensibility features attracted
+ dozens of developers to join in and submit new extension
+ modules. Arguably, this was one the key to PHP 3.0's tremendous
+ success. Other key features introduced in PHP 3.0 were the
+ object oriented syntax support and the much more powerful
+ and consistent language syntax.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ The whole new language was released under a new name, that
+ removed the implication of limited personal use that the
+ PHP/FI 2.0 name held. It was named plain 'PHP', with the
+ meaning being a recursive acronym - PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ By the end of 1998, PHP grew to an install base of tens of
+ thousands of users (estimated) and hundreds of thousands of
+ Web sites reporting it installed. At its peak, PHP 3.0 was
+ installed on approximately 10% of the Web servers on the
+ Internet.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ PHP 3.0 was officially released in June 1998, after having
+ spent about 9 months in public testing.
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
--->
+ <sect2 id="history.php4">
+ <title>PHP 4</title>
+ <para>
+ By the winter of 1998, shortly after PHP 3.0 was officially
+ released, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski have begun working
+ on a rewrite of PHP's core. The design goals were to improve
+ performance of complex applications, and improve the
+ modularity of PHP's code base. Such applications were made
+ possible by PHP 3.0's new features and support for a wide
+ variety of 3rd party databases and APIs, but PHP 3.0 was
+ not designed to handle such complex applications efficiently.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ The new engine, dubbed 'Zend Engine' (comprised of their
+ first names, Zeev and Andi), met these design goals
+ successfully, and was first introduced in mid 1999. PHP 4.0,
+ based on this engine, and coupled with a wide range of
+ additional new features, was officially released in May
+ 2000, almost two years after its predecessor, PHP 3.0.
+ In addition to the highly improved performance of this
+ version, PHP 4.0 included other key features such as
+ support for many more Web servers, HTTP sessions, output
+ buffering, more secure ways of handling user input and
+ several new language constructs.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ PHP 4 is currently the latest released version of PHP. Work
+ has already begun on modifying and improving the Zend Engine
+ to integrate the features which were designed for PHP 5.0.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Today, PHP is being used by hundreds of thousands of developers
+ (estimated), and several million sites report as having it
+ installed, which accounts for over 20% of the domains on the
+ Internet.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ PHP's development team includes dozens of developers, as well
+ as dozens others working on PHP-related projects such as PEAR
+ and the documentation project.
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
+ </sect1>
+
+ <sect1 id="history.php.related">
+ <title>History of PHP related projects</title>
+
+ <sect2 id="history.phpdoc">
+ <title>PHP Documentation Project</title>
+ <para>
+ <!-- Stig and Egon can do this I hope :) -->
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
-<chapt>PHP's history
- <sect>Overview of PHP's development
+ <sect2 id="history.pear">
+ <title>PEAR</title>
+ <para>
+ PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository (originally,
+ PHP Extension and Add-on Repository) is PHP's version of
+ foundation classes, and may grow in the future to be one
+ of the key ways to distribute both PHP and C-based PHP
+ extensions among developers.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ PEAR was born in discussions held in the PHP Developers'
+ Meeting (PDM) held in January 2000 in Tel Aviv. It was
+ created by Stig S. Bakken, and is dedicated to his first-born
+ daughter, Malin Bakken.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Since early 2000, PEAR has grown to be a big, significant
+ project with a large number of developers working on
+ implementing common, reusable functionality for the
+ benefit of the entire PHP community. PEAR today includes
+ a wide variety of infrastructure foundation classes
+ for database access, content caching, mathematical
+ calculations, eCommerce and much more.
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
+
+ <sect2 id="history.phpqa">
+ <title>PHP Quality Assurance Initiative</title>
+ <para>
+ The PHP Quality Assurance Initiative was set up in the
+ summer of 2000 in response to criticism that PHP releases
+ were not being tested well enough for production
+ environments. The team now consists of a core group of
+ developers with a good understanding of the PHP code
+ base. These developers spend a lot of their time
+ localizing and fixing bugs within PHP. In addition
+ there are many other team members who test and
+ provide feedback on these fixes using a wide variety
+ of platforms.
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
+
+ <sect2 id="history.phpgtk">
+ <title>PHP-GTK</title>
+ <para>
+ <!-- Andrei can do this I hope :) -->
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
+ </sect1>
+
+ <sect1 id="history.php.books">
+ <title>Books about PHP</title>
+ <para>
+ As PHP grew, it began to be recognized as a world-wide popular
+ development platform. One of the most interesting ways of
+ seeing this trend was by observing the books about PHP that
+ came out throughout the years.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ To the best of our knowledge, the first book dedicated to
+ PHP was 'php- dynamische webauftritte professionell realisieren'
+ - a German book published in 1999, authored by Egon Schmid,
+ Christian Cartus and Richard Blume. The first book in English
+ about PHP was published shortly afterwards, and was 'Core
+ PHP Programming' by Leon Atkinson. Both of these books covered
+ PHP 3.0.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ While these two books were the first of their kind - they were
+ followed by a large number of books from a host of authors and
+ publishers. There are over 40 books in English, 50 books in
+ German, and over 20 books in French! In addition, you can find
+ books about PHP in many other languages, including Spanish,
+ Korean, Japanese and Hebrew.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Clearly, this large number of books, written by different
+ authors, published by many publishers, and their availability
+ in so many languages - are a strong testimony for PHP's
+ world-wide success.
+ </para>
+ </sect1>
+
+ <sect1 id="history.php.publications">
+ <title>Publications about PHP</title>
+ <para>
+ To the best of our knowledge, the first article about PHP in
+ a hard-copy magazine was published in the French Informatiques
+ Magazine, towards the end of 1998, and covered PHP 3.0. As with
+ books, this was the first in a series of many articles published
+ about PHP in various prominent magazines.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Articles about PHP appeared in Dr. Dobbs, Linux Enterprise,
+ Linux Magazine and many more. Articles about migrating PHP-based
+ applications to PHP under Windows even appear on Microsoft's
+ very own MSDN!
+ </para>
+ </sect1>
+
+</appendix>
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