PHP 3: When the Web Personal Home Page Became a Language
It’s June 1998, and if you’re building websites, you’re likely tired of the "CGI-BIN" mess. Writing Perl or C scripts just to handle a simple form is overkill. We’ve been using PHP/FI (Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter) for a while, but it was limited. However, PHP 3 is a different beast entirely.
The Rewritten Engine
Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski have completely rewritten the core. It’s much faster, and more importantly, it’s extensible. You can now write modules in C to add support for different databases.
/* PHP 3 looks a lot like C, and that's why we love it */
<?php
$conn = mysql_connect("localhost", "user", "pass");
$res = mysql_query("SELECT title FROM posts", $conn);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($res)) {
echo "Post title: " . $row[0] . "<br>";
}
?>
The syntax is familiar to anyone who knows C or Perl, but it’s designed specifically to be embedded directly into HTML. No more print "<html>"; on every line of your Perl script.
A Database for Every Webmaster
PHP 3's strongest suit is its out-of-the-box support for a wide range of databases, especially MySQL. The combination of PHP and MySQL is becoming the "golden duo" for the burgeoning web. It’s making dynamic content accessible to people who aren't systems programmers.
The Community Explodes
We’re seeing the birth of the first "web apps"—guestbooks, forums, and simple CMS tools—all powered by PHP. It’s messy, sure, and the global namespace is already getting crowded, but the speed of development is unmatched. I’ve just migrated our company’s internal directory to PHP 3, and I did it in a single afternoon. The web is no longer just static pages; it’s becoming an application platform.