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PHP & Wordpress come home to Israel for major blogging conference

Posted on September 5, 2007 • By Rebecca Markowitz
Category: Technology |

The Technion Institute in Haifa has accomplished so much, it’s hard to keep track. I just discovered that the Technion was behind the creation of PHP, a database-driven computer programming language. Cool to some. Geeky to others. However, note that PHP is the language used to power over 20 million websites, and many blogs on a platform called Wordpress (this blog included).

Bringing it home. Israeli bloggers should get ready for a major blogging conference called WordCamp, set to take place around the holiday of Sukkot, in October. Click here for updates and more info.

For all those super-cool web developer people, The Wordcamp-Israel blog (in English) goes into more detail about PHP:

HP was written by the Danish/Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. In 1997, two Israeli Technion students, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, found Lerdorf’s language to be severely underpowered for developing an eCommerce application they were working on for a university project. They cooperated with Lerdorf to rewrite the parser and renamed the language PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. Here’s more on PHP from Wikipedia:

The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Public testing of PHP 3 began and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP’s core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999.^[6] They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel, which actively manages the development of PHP. In May 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. The most recent update released by The PHP Group, is for the older PHP version 4 code branch which, as of May 2007, is up to version 4.4.7. PHP 4 will be supported by security updates until 8 August 2008^[7]. On July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released powered by the new Zend Engine II…The latest stable version, PHP 5.2.4, was released on Aug 30, 2007.

The name “Zend” is comprised of Zeev and Andi’s first names. Andi and Zeev serve as senior executives at Zend. According to the Zend site, PHP powers 20 million websites and enjoys a following of over 4.5 million developers. PHP is the foundation for many open-source web applications, including forums, project management applications, and of course, WordPress.

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