1. May 11, 2011 PHP Hypertext Preprocessor

2. What is the technology? ✤ Server side scripting and programming language. ✤ Can be embedded in HTML ✤ Free and open sourced - community ✤ frequently updates and fixes bugs ✤ downloadable templates and open source solutions Open Sourced - led to high growth - ppl fixing and updating all of the time to create the best code. open source solutions - learn from them and modify. scripting lang - command code for controlling some time of program, operating system, software, hardware and websites. stored only in the code or a stored set of commands, user of program will never see it. Open Sourced - led to high growth - ppl fixing and updating all of the time to create the best code. open source solutions - learn from them and modify. scripting lang - command code for controlling some time of program, operating system, software, hardware and websites. stored only in the code or a stored set of commands, user of program will never see it.

3. What is the technology? ✤ Cross-platform - use any OS server. ✤ Can relay information about specific users to produce certain results (Echo) ✤ Facebook uses this language to target users with custom advertisements Cross platform - for the most part.

4. Who? When? Why? ✤ Rasmus Lerdorf, in 1995 ✤ wanted to see how many people were looking at his resume ✤ released source code to public - help improve and fix bugs ✤ More compatible across multiple platforms than C, but more limited than Perl

5. still one man project 3.0 was still considered underpowered for eCommerce 9 months in public testing still one man project 3.0 was still considered underpowered for eCommerce 9 months in public testing History ✤ 1997 - PHP 2.0, lots of initial bugs fixed, as many as 50,000 domains had it installed (1% of all domains on the Internet at the time) ✤ 1998 - PHP 3.0, most resembles what we know today. Re-written by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski (halted production of PHP 2.0) ✤ tremendous success, “object oriented syntax support” (attracted developers) ✤ broadened scope, not just for personal home page use ✤ At its peak, it was installed on ~10% of all Web servers

6. ^ Suraski - Gutman ^

7. History ✤ 1999 - PHP 4.0, Gutmans and Suraski began rewrite, focused on modularity and performance ✤ supported more Web servers, HTTP sessions, output buffering, higher security for personal data ✤ several million sites had it installed, accounting for over 20% of all Web domains. ✤ 2004 - PHP 5.0, uses Zend Engine 2.0

8. Use has declined slightly but it’s still 5th most common language on the web according to the TIOBE community index

9. PHP Managment ✤ Open source community. ✤ Centered around Zend: PHP company founded by Gutmans and Suraski ✤ Zend and PHP developers receive significant funding from venture capitalist firms and from companies like Intel.

10. Certification ✤ Zend Certification: http://www.zend.com/en/services/certificationhttp://www.zend.com/en/services/certification ✤ most credible ✤ costs between $125 and 160, but include yellow page listing ✤ W3 School Certification: http://www.w3schools.com/cert/cert_php.asphttp://www.w3schools.com/cert/cert_php.asp ✤ taken online, decreased credibility, $75 ✤ quick and easy, but not for serious professionals other certifications exist but are not as credible.

11. Related/Competing Technologies ✤ Perl- PHP was designed only for scripting for the web, while Perl was designed for a lot more, making it much more complicated. PHP is much easier to integrate into existing HTML and has all of the functionality of Perl without making it as complex. Perl has maintained a steady language since the 80’s but PHP is quickly evolving and catching up to Perl’s standards. ✤ ASP (Active Server Pages) - coded by Visual Basic Script, Jscript and C#. Only available on Microsoft Internet Information Server and is much slower than PHP. ✤ ColdFusion- PHP is available on almost every platform while ColdFusion, like ASP, is limited. Although ColdFusion has more limitations, it was designed with non-programmers in mind so it is much easier to pick up than PHP. copy and pasted? if not someone writes realllly well.

12. Best Practices for PHP ✤ Make sure to always use long form of open tags <?php ✤ never use short hand <? ✤ Code to a set standard (Zend Framework)(Zend Framework) ✤ Learn and follow the PHP ManualPHP Manual ✤ Make sure to comment your code and changes but also use meaningful and consistent naming. Short tag- cause conflicts with XML parsers ( converts xml to XML DOM) standard way for accessing and manipulating XML documents. presents an XML document as a tree-structure. sharing/distributing code -> others will have to modify theirs to fit theirs Short tag- cause conflicts with XML parsers ( converts xml to XML DOM) standard way for accessing and manipulating XML documents. presents an XML document as a tree-structure. sharing/distributing code -> others will have to modify theirs to fit theirs

13. Live examples ✤ Facebook Facebook ✤ Yahoo Yahoo ✤ Digg Digg ✤ Wikipedia Wikipedia ✤ Photobucket Photobucket mention accessibility here. Dynamic web pages are easier to use b/c they require less typing. Does Wikipedia, actually us PHP? mention accessibility here. Dynamic web pages are easier to use b/c they require less typing. Does Wikipedia, actually us PHP?

14. Future of PHP Cake PHP Cake PHP= an open source web application framework, it keeps you from building web apps from scratch. PHP is here to stay, Future seems to be in constant improvements in compatibility and semantics. No serious paradigm shifts on the horizon Cake PHP= an open source web application framework, it keeps you from building web apps from scratch. PHP is here to stay, Future seems to be in constant improvements in compatibility and semantics. No serious paradigm shifts on the horizon