 history of php rasmus lerdorf  who wrote the original common gateway interface binaries php standing for personal home page began as a set of common gateway interface binaries written in the c programming language in 1994 by the danish   greenlandic programmer rasmus lerdorf  lerdorf initially created these personal home page tools to replace a small set of perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage  the tools were originally created to perform tasks such as displaying his résumé and recording how much traffic his page was receiving  3  he combined these binaries with his form interpreter to create php fi which had more functionality it included a larger c implementation which could communicate with databases and helped build simple dynamic web applications  he released php publicly on june 8   1995 to speed up the finding of bugs and improving the code  8  this release was named php version 2 and already had basic functionality that php has today this includes perllike variables form handling and the ability to embed html the syntax was similar to perl but was more limited simpler and less consistent  3  andi gutmans  who along with zeev suraski  rewrote the parser that formed php 3 zeev suraski and andi gutmans  two israeli developers at the technion iit  rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of php 3 changing the language s name to the recursive initialism php hypertext preprocessor   3  the development team officially released php fi 2 in november 1997 after months of beta testing afterwards public testing of php 3 began and the official launch came in june 1998 suraski and gutmans then started a new rewrite of php s core producing the zend engine in 1999  9  they also founded zend technologies in ramat gan  israel which manages the development of php  3  on may 22   2000  php 4 powered by the zend engine 10 was released  3  on july 13   2004  php 5 was released and is powered by the new zend engine ii  3  php 5 included new features such as improved support for objectoriented programming  the php data objects extension which defines a lightweight and consistent interface for accessing databases and numerous performance enhancements  10  the most recent update released by the php group is for the older php version 4 code branch as of january 2008 this branch is up to version 448 php 4 will be supported by security updates until august 8   2008   11  php 5 is the only stable version still being developed late static binding has been missing from php and will be added in version 53  12   13  development on php 4 ceased at the end of 2007 except for the critical security updates for php 4 already mentioned  14   11  php 6 is now under development and major changes include the removal of registerglobals  15    magic quotes  and safe mode   11   16  php does not have complete native support for unicode or multibyte strings   17  unicode support will be added in php 6  18  many high profile open source projects ceased to support php 4 in new code as of february 5   2008  due to the gophp5 initiative provided by a consortium of php developers promoting the transition from php 4 to php 5  19   20  