PHP was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf. It was first developed in 1994 as Personal Home Page. It was released in 1995 as Personal Home Page Tools. This was a parser which interpreted files written in the simplified programming language of PHP. The programming language of PHP was developed long after other scripting language had been in use so Lerdorf was able to incorporate the lessons of programmers experience with those other languages.
The experience with the initial offering of PHP was positive enough to prompt Lerdorf to create an improved version of the parser, called PHP/FI (form interpreter). This version could interpret HTML code as well as the PHP programming code. PHP/FI also made some provision for database capabilities by supporting some elements of mSQL.
By mid-1997 there were about fifty thousand websites created using PHP. At that time the programming for PHP was recreated with a team of programmers helping Lerdorf in this effort. This revised version was called PHP 3. PHP 3 provided support for MySQL, the database query language, among a collection of other database systems.
The next version, PHP 4, increased the features of PHP but the subsequent version PHP 5 was more devoted to increasing the efficiency of the system than expanding its features. Now PHP can be included within an HTML file.
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