PHP 5 is a very popular point for discussion within the PHP community. With the 3rd Release Candidate released on 8th June (2004) and the Zend PHP 5 Coding Contest, it is easy to see that the full stable release of PHP version 5 is just around the corner.
At this very late stage of development, David Mytton over at Olate managed to obtain an interview with the two original creators of PHP and Zend – Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans – to find out more about their lives as developers of possibly the most popular web programming language ever!
1. Firstly, can you tell us a little about yourselves, and your involvement with the PHP and the Zend development team? What first got you into software development and what is your programming background? What got you into developing applications such as the Zend products and PHP itself?
Andi and I created the language in 1997, when we needed a solution to implement a shopping cart project for University. Some ideas were borrowed from PHP/FI, a tool that we tried to use beforehand, but that proved to be far too limited and unreliable for our purposes. Our project fixed most of the shortcomings of PHP/FI, and was built on top of a reliable infrastructure, that was highly extensible.
At some point we realized that what we had in our hands was of great value to many other people around the world, and decided to release it for everyone to use. Within about a year, PHP replaced PHP/FI completely.
Since then, we've been developing and maintaining the core engine of PHP, the Zend Engine, as well as much of the infrastructure code of the language. In the past, we've also been involved in writing some of the foundation modules of PHP, such as database modules (MySQL, Sybase, PostgreSQL) and others.
News source: Olate
