PHP

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PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly. Thanks to this characteristics PHP is [widely used http://www.php.net/usage.php].

PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. This confuses many people because the first word of the acronym is the acronym. This type of acronym is called a recursive acronym.

PHP started as a quick Perl hack written by Rasmus Lerdorf in late 1994. Over the next two to three years, it evolved into what we today know as PHP/FI 2.0. PHP/FI started to get a lot of users, but things didn't start flying until Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans suddenly came along with a new parser in the summer of 1997, leading to PHP 3.0. PHP 3.0 defined the syntax and semantics used in both versions 3 and 4. PHP/FI 2.0 is a no longer supported version of PHP. PHP 3 is the successor to PHP/FI 2.0 and is a lot nicer. PHP 4 is the fourth generation of PHP, which uses the Zend engine under the hood. PHP 5 uses Zend engine 2 which, among other things, offers many additional OOP features.

To read an introduction to the language PHP.