“The infamous ApacheCon conference is officially underway, and
who better to speak at it then some of the main developers behind
Apache’s most popular module? That’s right, some of the people
behind PHP, Nathan Wallace, Craig Kohtz and Tobias Ratschiller,
will be giving presentations for the next three days on various
topics, including migrating from ASP to PHP and advanced PHP
programming.”
“According to E-Soft Inc, mod_php has a 5% lead on the FrontPage
module for Apache. Since nearly 1.5 million domains are currently
using PHP, the world has taken notice. PHP took its first steps in
the fall of 1994, when Rasmus Lerdorf created a system to
administrate his online resume. In 1995, the parser was rewritten,
a few features were added and PHP 2.0/FI was born. People started
contributing code, and a community quickly enveloped itself around
the language. It was in 1997 that the development of PHP took a
drastic change. The project was no longer Rasmus’ pet project, but
rather a team effort of developers. Two of these developers, Zeev
Suraski and Andi Gutmans, decided to rewrite the language parser
once again, and PHP3 was born.”
“So where is PHP at today? Well, the PHP 3.x generation is still
alive and being updated, though a great deal of attention is being
focused on the beta versions of PHP 4.0. The last PHP3 update was
on February 25, and brings the version up to 3.0.15. The update
brings on several new security features, and it is highly
recommended to upgrade your version if you run PHP in safe mode.
PHP 4.0 is being worked on quite a bit though, so I would expect
few more 3.x releases to become available anytime soon. The big,
high-traffic users of PHP still are sticking to the 3.x releases
though. The lead developer behind Linux.com, Gareth Watts, has
been a fan of PHP since 2.0. Linux.com is currently powered by
version 3.0.14, and everyone is happy with it. ‘It’s lightweight,
reasonably efficient and does exactly what we need it to
do’.”