PHP - What and Why

Who invented PHP? Rasmus Lerdorf, a guy who wrote it as CGI binaries in C in order to help manage his personal webpages (back in 1994). Lerdorf named it PHP for "Personal Home Page". Later it was renamed "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" by some of the colleagues Lerdorf teamed up with in order to improve on PHP and make it more standardized. Why use PHP?

  • Open source/FREE
  • Cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux)
  • Powerful, robust, scalable (it'll be able to handle the traffic growth)
  • Web development specific (unlike java, ruby on rails, c, and others)
  • Large developer community
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