“PHP began as a small project to enhance a single Web site;
it eventually became the most popular server-side scripting
language for use with Apache. But though the open source product
has come into wide use in its most recent version, PHP3, it’s been
limited primarily to small- to midsized projects. PHP3’s
handling of “garbage collection”-reclaiming memory resources that
are no longer used in a program-as well as its performance and
syntax make it less than optimal for large, complex projects.”
“But that should change with PHP4, which is in beta (available
at www.php.net) and being readied for final release in the first
quarter of 2000. PHP4 has a rewritten scripting engine, named Zend
(www.zend.com) after its two authors, that offers much faster
performance than the original engine. The new engine and new
language features, such as resource reallocation (garbage
collection), object overloading and object-oriented extensions,
make PHP a strong contender for server-side scripting development
in simple and complex projects alike.”
“PHP4 has no server-specific code; its resulting
platform-independence gives you added flexibility-you can choose
NT, Linux or other Unix versions, depending on your hardware and
skills. Nor are you limited to Microsoft Internet Information
Server (IIS) or Apache Web servers-you can use either of these, or
a different server altogether. And you’re free to use a multitude
of databases as your back end.”