PHP

PHP is a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as
a general-purpose programming language. Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994,
the PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group PHP originally
stood for Personal Home Page, but it now stands for the recursive backronym PHP:
Hypertext Preprocessor.
PHP code may be embedded into HTML code, or it can be used in combination with
various web template systems, web content management system and web frameworks.
PHP code is usually processed by a PHP interpreter implemented as amodule in the web
server or as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executable. The web server combines the
results of the interpreted and executed PHP code, which may be any type of data, including
images, with the generated web page. PHP code may also be executed with a command-line
interface (CLI) and can be used to implement standalone graphical applications.
The standard PHP interpreter, powered by the Zend Engine, is free software released
under the PHP License. PHP has been widely ported and can be deployed on most web
servers on almost every operating system and platform, free of charge.[7]
The PHP language evolved without a written formal specification or standard until 2014,
leaving the canonical PHP interpreter as a de facto standard. Since 2014 work has gone on
to create a formal PHP specification.
Rasmus Lerdorf, who wrote the original Common Gateway Interface (CGI) component,
together with Andi Gutmansand Zeev Suraski, who rewrote the parser that formed PHP 3.
PHP development began in 1994 when Rasmus Lerdorf wrote several Common Gateway
Interface (CGI) programs in C, which he used to maintain his personal homepage. He
extended them to work with web forms and to communicate with databases, and called this
implementation "Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter" or PHP/FI.
PHP/FI could be used to build simple, dynamic web applications. To
accelerate bug reporting and improve the code, Lerdorf initially announced the release of
PHP/FI as "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0" on the Usenetdiscussion
group comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi on June 8, 1995. This release already had the
basic functionality that PHP has as of 2013. This included Perl-like variables, form
handling, and the ability to embed HTML. The syntax resembled that of Perl but was
simpler, more limited and less consistent.
Early PHP was not intended to be a new programming language, and grew organically,
with Lerdorf noting in retrospect: "I don’t know how to stop it, there was never any intent
to write a programming language […] I have absolutely no idea how to write a
programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way." A development
team began to form and, after months of work and beta testing, officially released PHP/FI 2
in November 1997.
The fact that PHP was not originally designed but instead was developed organically has
led to inconsistent naming of functions and inconsistent ordering of their parameters. In
some cases, the function names were chosen to match the lower-level libraries which PHP
was "wrapping", while in some very early versions of PHP the length of the function names
was used internally as a hash function, so names were chosen to improve the distribution
of hash values. PHP 3 and 4
Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3,
changing the language's name to the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
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. They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel.
On May 22, 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. As of August 2008
this branch reached version 4.4.9. PHP 4 is no longer under development nor will any
security updates be released
PHP 5
On July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by the new Zend Engine II. PHP 5 included
new features such as improved support for object-oriented programming, the PHP Data
Objects (PDO) extension (which defines a lightweight and consistent interface for accessing
databases), and numerous performance enhancements.[22] In 2008 PHP 5 became the only
stable version under development. Late static binding had been missing from PHP and was
added in version 5.3.
Many high-profile open-source projects ceased to support PHP 4 in new code as of
February 5, 2008, because of the GoPHP5 initiative, provided by a consortium of PHP
developers promoting the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5. Over time, PHP interpreters
became available on most existing 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, either by building
them from the PHP source code, or by using pre-built binaries.[28] For the PHP versions 5.3
and 5.4, the only available Microsoft Windows binary distributions were 32-
bit x86 builds, requiring Windows 32-bit compatibility mode while using Internet
Information Services (IIS) on a 64-bit Windows platform. PHP version 5.5 made the 64-
bit x86-64 builds available for Microsoft Windows.[31]
PHP 6 and Unicode
PHP received mixed reviews due to lacking native Unicode support at the core language
level. In 2005, a project headed by Andrei Zmievski was initiated to bring native Unicode
support throughout PHP, by embedding the International Components for Unicode (ICU)
library, and representing text strings as UTF-16 internally. Since this would cause major
changes both to the internals of the language and to user code, it was planned to release
this as version 6.0 of the language, along with other major features then in development.
However, a shortage of developers who understood the necessary changes, and
performance problems arising from conversion to and from UTF-16, which is rarely used in
a web context, led to delays in the project As a result, a PHP 5.3 release was created in
2009, with many non-Unicode features back-ported from PHP 6, notably namespaces. In
March 2010, the project in its current form was officially abandoned, and a PHP 5.4 release
was prepared containing most remaining non-Unicode features from PHP 6, such as traits
and closure re-binding. Initial hopes were that a new plan would be formed for Unicode
integration, but as of 2014 none has been adopted.
PHP
During 2014 and 2015, a new major PHP version was developed, which was numbered
PHP 7. The numbering of this version involved some debate.[38] While the PHP 6 Unicode
experiment had never been released, several articles and book titles referenced the PHP 6
name, which might have caused confusion if a new release were to reuse the name. After a
vote, the name PHP 7 was chosen.
The foundation of PHP 7 is a PHP branch that was originally dubbed PHP next
generation (phpng). It was authored by Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui and Nikita Popov, and
aimed to optimize PHP performance by refactoring the Zend Engine while retaining near-
complete language compatibility. As of 14 July 2014, WordPress-based benchmarks, which
served as the main benchmark suite for the phpng project, showed an almost 100%
increase in performance. Changes from phpng are also expected to make it easier to
improve performance in the future, as more compact data structures and other changes are
seen as better suited for a successful migration to a just-in-time (JIT) compiler. Because of
the significant changes, the reworked Zend Engine is called Zend Engine 3, succeeding Zend
Engine 2 used in PHP 5.
Because of major internal changes in phpng, it must receive a new major version number of
PHP, rather than a minor PHP 5 release, according to PHP's release process. Major versions
of PHP are allowed to break backward-compatibility of code and therefore PHP 7
presented an opportunity for other improvements beyond phpng that require backward-
compatibility breaks. In particular, it involved the following changes:
 Many fatal- or recoverable-level legacy PHP error mechanisms were replaced with
modern object-oriented exceptions
 The syntax for variable dereferencing was reworked to be internally more consistent
and complete, allowing the use of the operators ->, [], (), {}, and :: with arbitrary
meaningful left-hand-side expressions
 Support for legacy PHP 4-style constructor methods was removed
 The behavior of the foreach statement was changed to be more predictable
 Constructors for the few classes built-in to PHP which returned null upon failure were
changed to throw an exception instead, for consistency
 Several unmaintained or deprecated server application programming
interfaces (SAPIs) and extensions were removed from the PHP core, most notably the
legacy mysqlextension
 The behavior of the list() operator was changed to remove support for string
 Support for legacy ASP-style PHP code delimiters (<% and %>, <script
language=php> and </script>) was removed
 An oversight allowing a switch statement to have multiple default clauses was fixed[54]
 Support for hexadecimal number support in some implicit conversions from strings to
number types was removed
 The left-shift and right-shift operators were changed to behave more consistently
across platforms
 Conversions between integers and floating point numbers were tightened and
implemented more consistently across platforms
PHP 7 also included new language features. Most notably, it introduces return type
declarations for functions which complement the existing parameter type declarations, and
support for the scalar types (integer, float, string, and boolean) in parameter and return
type declarations

MySQL (officially pronounced as /maɪ ˌɛskjuːˈɛl/ "My S-Q-L",) is an open-source relational

database management system(RDBMS);in July 2013, it was the world's second most widely
used RDBMS, and the most widely used open-sourceclient–server model RDBMS. It is
named after co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter, MyThe SQL acronym stands
forStructured Query Language. The MySQL development project has made its source
code available under the terms of theGNU General Public License, as well as under a variety
of proprietary agreements. MySQL was owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm,
the Swedish company MySQL AB, now owned by Oracle Corporation. For proprietary use,
several paid editions are available, and offer additional functionality.
MySQL is a popular choice of database for use in web applications, and is a central
component of the widely used LAMPopen-source web application software stack (and
other "AMP" stacks). LAMP is an acronym for "Linux, Apache,
MySQL,Perl/PHP/Python". Free-software open-source projects that require a full-featured
database management system often use MySQL. Applications that use the MySQL database
include: TYPO3, MODx, Joomla, WordPress, phpBB, MyBB, Drupal and other software.
MySQL is also used in many high-profile, large-scale websites,
including Google[12][13] (though not for searches), Facebook, Twitter Flickr, and YouTube.
On all platforms except Windows, MySQL ships with no GUI tools to administer MySQL
databases or manage data contained within the databases. Users may use the
included command line tools, or install MySQL Workbench via a separate download.
Deployment

LAMP software bundle, displayed here together with Squid.

MySQL can be built and installed manually from source code, but it is more commonly
installed from a binary package unless special customizations are required. On most Linux
distributions, the package management system can download and install MySQL with
minimal effort, though further configuration is often required to adjust security and
optimization settings.
Though MySQL began as a low-end alternative to more powerful proprietary databases, it
has gradually evolved to support higher-scale needs as well. It is still most commonly used
in small to medium scale single-server deployments, either as a component in a LAMP-
based web application or as a standalone database server. Much of MySQL's appeal
originates in its relative simplicity and ease of use, which is enabled by an ecosystem of
open source tools such as phpMyAdmin. In the medium range, MySQL can be scaled by
deploying it on more powerful hardware, such as a multi-processor server with gigabytes
of memory.
There are however limits to how far performance can scale on a single server ('scaling up'),
so on larger scales, multi-server MySQL ('scaling out') deployments are required to provide
improved performance and reliability. A typical high-end configuration can include a
powerful master database which handles data write operations and is replicated to
multiple slaves that handle all read operations The master server continually pushes binlog
events to connected slaves so in the event of failure a slave can be promoted to become the
new master, minimizing downtime. Further improvements in performance can be achieved
by caching the results from database queries in memory using memcached, or breaking
down a database into smaller chunks called shards which can be spread across a number of
distributed server clusters.