At the beginning
of 1999, Netcraft (http://www.netcraft.com/), an Internet research and analysis
company, reported a conservative estimate of a user base of more than 1 million, making
PHP one of the most popular scripting languages in the world. Its popularity surpassed
even the greatest expectations of the developers, as it soon became apparent that
users intended to use PHP to power far larger applications than originally anticipated.
Two core developers, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, took the initiative to completely
rethink the way PHP operated, culminating in a rewriting of the PHP parser, dubbed the
Zend scripting engine. The result of this work was in the PHP 4 release.
?– Note In addition to leading development of the Zend engine and playing a major role in steering the
overall development of the PHP language, Suraski and Gutmans are cofounders of Zend Technologies
Ltd. (http://www.zend.com/). Zend is the most visible provider of products and services for developing,
deploying, and managing PHP applications. Check out the Zend Web site for more about the company??™s
offerings, as well as an enormous amount of free learning resources.
CHAPTER 1 ?– INTRODUCING PHP 3
PHP 4
On May 22, 2000, roughly 18 months after the first official announcement of the new
development effort, PHP 4.0 was released. Many considered the release of PHP 4 to
be the language??™s official debut within the enterprise development scene, an opinion
backed by the language??™s meteoric rise in popularity.
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