3 ms·
PHP's creator offers his thoughts on the PHP phenomenon, what shaped and motivated the language, and where the PHP movement is heading
- davidw 18y agoRasmus is a smart guy and worth listening to, but this article is ancient (Apache 1.3? PHP for 'nearly' 10 years?)
- tvon 18y agoYeah, I like PHP quite a bit for the instant gratification, it definitely has the quickest zero-to-dynamic-content rate in the world today[1] (though I can't speak for Windows systems, dunno what has the lowest barriers of entry for an aspiring, Windows-based geek).. But, the landscape has changed drastically since this article has written. I guess I'd consider PHP the second generation of web development platforms[2], with CGI being the first. Not to say PHP is going away, but it's certainly not a phenomenon at this stage in the game, its a de-facto tool but it's facing an uphill battle to stay important (IMO), the phenomena today are Rails, Django and the slew of 3rd generation tools that accompany them. [1] before anyone argues, it's basically test.php: <? print 'hello ' . $_GET['hello'] ?> and then http://localhost/~user/test.php?hello=world http://localhost/~user/test.php?hello=world The tools are ubiquitous enough that setup is a non-issue. [2] I'd say that our better, late 2nd and early 3rd generation tools lowered some barriers to development and allowed us to rethink the web and how we were building it, which led to "Web 2.0".
- donaq 18y agoRails and Django are frameworks, not languages, of which PHP also has a few, for example, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, etc.
- scorxn 18y agoThat's what struck me about this article. PHP arose as a framework between C and Apache. It makes one wonder, what's the threshold between framework and language?
- davidw 18y agoPHP was and is a language. Apache has always had a fairly accessible API. The two are quite different things.
- tvon 18y agoThat's my point, more or less. Now PHP is just another programming language to write a framework in, it used to be more significant.
- alanthonyc 18y agophp is a movement?
- csomar 18y agoThe article is old no? Since, now PHP is even bigger! You don't have to build projects you just hack, there's infinity of Open Source Prjects in PHP. It's the Choice number 1 for web developement.
- bartl 18y agoThe sample code from that pre-PHP thing makes me cringe: <!--sql database select * from table where user='$username'--> Oh yeah. I can see this ultimately leading to PHP, complete with either "Bobby Tables" vulnerability, or alternatively with Magic Quotes. Bad, from the start.