His script performed two
tasks: logging visitor information, and displaying the count of visitors to the Web page.
Because the Web as we know it today was still young at that time, tools such as these
were nonexistent, and they prompted e-mails inquiring about Lerdorf??™s scripts. Lerdorf
thus began giving away his toolset, dubbed Personal Home Page (PHP).
The clamor for the PHP toolset prompted Lerdorf to continue developing the
language, with perhaps the most notable early change being a new feature for converting
data entered in an HTML form into symbolic variables, encouraging exportation into
other systems. To accomplish this, he opted to continue development in C code rather
than Perl. Ongoing additions to the PHP toolset culminated in November 1997 with
the release of PHP 2.0, or Personal Home Page/Form Interpreter (PHP/FI). As a result
of PHP??™s rising popularity, the 2.0 release was accompanied by a number of enhancements
and improvements from programmers worldwide.
The new PHP release was extremely popular, and a core team of developers soon
joined Lerdorf. They kept the original concept of incorporating code directly alongside
HTML and rewrote the parsing engine, giving birth to PHP 3.0. By the June 1998 release
of version 3.0, more than 50,000 users were using PHP to enhance their Web pages.
Development continued at a hectic pace over the next two years, with hundreds of
functions being added and the user count growing in leaps and bounds.
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