25 YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE THE FIRST VERSION OF PHP WAS RELEASED!

This month of June it has been 25 years since the launch of the first version of PHP . It was on June 8, 1995, when the programmer Rasmus Lerdorf announced it under the name of “Personal Home Page Tools”. Such was its importance, that 25 years later it is present in most of the web pages that need server programming.

Before the arrival of PHP, web programming was based on CGI written in C, or programming in Perl, and both options weren’t practical at all. The goal of the PHP programmer was to create a language that is very easy to use on any web server. And boy did it succeed!

His original idea was for web developers to write the bulk of web applications in C, so that PHP would be used only as a template language. However, in a short time he found that everyone wanted to use only the latter for all that it was capable of offering.

Over the years the importance of PHP grew, to the point that to develop the version of PHP 7 (the latest and the one we use in Rana Negra), even its impact on climate change was taken into account . And it is that if all the machines that use PHP 5.0 migrated to PHP 7, the global energy savings would be 15,000 million kilowatt-hours each year, so the emission of 7,500 million kilos of carbon dioxide would be avoided.

But this is not all, since it should also be noted that the web pages of old versions of PHP, such as 5.x and 5.6, are exposed to security problems as they do not have support and security updates since December 31, 2019. If you want to know more about it, you can consult the article on our blog: Urgent! Update the PHP version of your website or it will be exposed to security problems

For all this it is not surprising that PHP is the main engine of the web, and this is mainly due to its flexibility and the dynamics that characterize it. On the other hand, the fact that it is a simple language to use, has also allowed many people who are starting in the world of web development , to begin to learn in a simple way.

Without a doubt, the future of PHP is very promising, and this is undoubtedly contributed by the mentality of Lerdorf, who is currently at the forefront of this project. Its Open Source nature has made it possible for it to work alongside thousands of collaborators and developers, hence its popularity and longevity.

For all these reasons it is not surprising that some of the most famous developments on the planet, such as WordPress, Wikipedia or Facebook, are partly based on PHP. Likewise, it is also the language most widely deployed by companies hosting offering the tool PHPMyAdmin to manage databases MySQL to customers. 25 YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE THE FIRST VERSION OF PHP WAS RELEASED!