Chapter 1. Ecosystem Overview

It has been more than two decades now since the birth of PHP. Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, the PHP acronym initially stood for Personal Home Page. Back then, PHP was merely a few Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs in C, used to power a simple web page.

Though PHP was not intended to be a new programming language, the idea caught on. During the late nineties Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, co-founders of Zend Technologies, continued the work on PHP by rewriting its entire parser, giving birth to PHP 3. The PHP language name acronym now stood for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

PHP positions itself among the top ten programming languages in the world. According to TIOBE, the software quality company, ...

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