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PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

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Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#71

Post by habibur »

Cullinet wrote: post #49
dspillett wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It basically did for simple web programming what visual basic did for Windows desktop toys: allowed you to throw some UI together (drag & drop components in the VB case, any old HTML with links or forms for PHP) then start stringing bit of code in haphazardly to link it together. No need to learn a more complex compiler or other build tools, worry about configuring CGI or other web server tech (unless running PHP you…

If someone proposed a conspiracy theory for why the rapid application development tools of the middle 1990s became extinct in reaction to plotting by corporate interests in perpetuating the value of consulting services and the high salaries of CS graduates, I would buy the hardback edition immediately. VB, Visual Age, Delhi, Genera on Tru64, RDB and RMS and DEC TM giving you schema less (noSQL to taste) wan -clustere…

> why the rapid application development tools of the middle 1990s became extinct

RAD tools were focused on Desktop application development and web suddenly took over everything.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#72

Post by gscott »

tyingq wrote: post #66

Another fun piece of PHP history: The old leaked source code for Facebook's index.php and search.php circa 2007: https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406

That was probably the last time the Facebook code was ever sane and readable.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#73

Post by oscargrouch »

carabiner wrote: post #32
oscargrouch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you are lacking some context. Back in the day, you could: * Be bold enough to use Linux or FreeBSD and use CGI or Perl as the only free version * Use ASP but pay license fees for Windows NT, ISS and SQL Server * Use ColdFusion which was kind of trendy but was pretty expensive. When PHP arrived it was so refreshing. I used to make my stuff in Apache+PHP, MySQL and Linux and it was magical what you could do wit…

I remember my employer was paying Indian consultants a fortune to build a web app in ASP that didn't work. I told them I could do it in PHP in a week, but they didn't trust some "free program."

I've saved a startup once from going bankrupt more or less like this.

They were paying a lot for ASP and a shitty product(cant remember the name..it was something like WebObjects) that was taking too long to load, the newly born company i was hired for would cease to exist, so even thought i was hired as a sysadmin to manage the network, linux and databases, i've used my low skills as a programmer, without nobody asking me, and designed the thing in secret, in about two or three weeks with PHP, Linux and MySql instead.

The (news based, with a lot of personalization page) loaded in about 400 milliseconds instead of what once was a 10 seconds load.

My bosses were a little skeptic at first, because the ASP folks was a team formed with university professors and skilled pros, and i was a teen that was not even hired as a coder. Also it was so much faster that they thought i could only be cheating somehow (like static instead of personalized with data from a backend db)..

Linux and open source was also faced with skepticism, specially when confronted with Microsoft stuff that everybody was used to back then.

The LAMP stack was a wonder back in those days, and it helped a lot to popularize Linux, MySQL, Apache and PHP. I know today PHP doesn't look so cool giving all the other players, but in the context it was launched it was so much better than all the status quo of the nineties where the options were quite limited.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#74

Post by geitir »

aeontech wrote: post #52

I feel certain that an entire generation of careers started from Rasmus Lerdorf's little hobby project. Despite the fact that things like Perl Mason, Tcl web apps, and your bog standard CGI scripts already existed, nothing compared to PHP's wild grab bag of a standard library, and above all, the documentation with user-contributed notes and examples (not to mention that there was nothing similar/free in Windows-land)…

It def started mine. The biggest for me was the excellent documentation and comments as you said. The comments were like an early version of stackoverflow

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#75

Post by taneq »

superasn wrote: post #54

PHP is proof how little the core web technologies change over the years, even though so many new technologies have come after it. Looking at this page I beleive I can still make a pretty decent website backend using vanilla php (including authentication) and a nice front end using plain old html and javascript from so many years ago.

PHP has changed quite a lot over the years, though. Not so much the core language (although it has) but the ecosystem has matured a lot.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#76

Post by dimitrios1 »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #13
alberth wrote: post #11

It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s. You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server. I’m still not certain even today, if anything exist…

> I’m still not certain even today, if anything exists that is faster to get a dynamic site up and running than PHP. With PHP you can just start typing in your file and produce output. Even with lightweight frameworks like Flask there is boilerplate.

This ignores the monstrous complexity of setting up PHP (and php-fpm) on a host machine. I prefer fully contained targeted binaries these days.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#77

Post by kijin »

taneq wrote: post #75
superasn wrote: post #54

PHP is proof how little the core web technologies change over the years, even though so many new technologies have come after it. Looking at this page I beleive I can still make a pretty decent website backend using vanilla php (including authentication) and a nice front end using plain old html and javascript from so many years ago.

PHP has changed quite a lot over the years, though. Not so much the core language (although it has) but the ecosystem has matured a lot.

Same as most other parts of the web.

20-25 years ago, everyone used tables for layout and random snippets of JS were scattered everywhere. HTML today has a much more expressive vocabulary as well as a whole suite of well-established best practices. Meanwhile, JS has evolved from a bunch of cute onmouseover handlers to an entire ecosystem in its own right.

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#78

Post by oscargrouch »

cutler wrote: post #67
carabiner wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember my employer was paying Indian consultants a fortune to build a web app in ASP that didn't work. I told them I could do it in PHP in a week, but they didn't trust some "free program."

Ha, I can relate to that. Met a potential in the mid-2000s who lived down the road running a travel agency which was falling over due to bugs in its web app. He knew nothing about technology other than that his app needed to parse "an XML" to work properly. "Can you get the XMLs working?". As soon as he showed me a couple of files I realised it was a Classic ASP site written in VBScript running on some overpriced Win…

I didn't even remember this, OMG.. VBScript that used to ship with IE and could be used instead of Javascript.

We are so lucky that Bill Gates missed how important internet would turn out to be..

Re: PHP 3.0 Final is out (1998)

#79

Post by tomnipotent »

nly wrote: post #12
alberth wrote: post #11

It’s hard to explain just how much easier PHP made creating a dynamic web site back in the 90s / early 00s. You drop a file in your public web server folder and you’re done. Prior was CGI Perl scripts that hacked together how to access session and rest data. Or you had to develop in C. PHP had native support for the web. It also eliminate the need for an app server. I’m still not certain even today, if anything exist…

I'm currently working on a Django project and have to restart uwsgi after each git pull. It's a pain

Use py-autoreload in your uwsgi config.
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