History of web dev programming languages

There were a huge battle on the topic “The necessary to know the developer and history of a language on which we make our living”. We code a “language” for years and don’t know who was the mastermind behind it, may be it’s silly. Not knowing their name also make us miss some of their other excellent articles and products. Our dev life is full of huge rush. So most of us have no time to net searching to know the masterminds name or history. So here I try to do it in a nutshell.

PHP:

PHP (a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a computer scripting language, originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. It is for server-side scripting, but can be used from a command line interface or in standalone graphical applications.

While PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995(first creator), the main implementation of PHP is now produced by The PHP Group and serves as the de facto standard for PHP as there is no formal specification. Released under the PHP License, the Free Software Foundation considers it to be free software.

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. It generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output. It can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. PHP is installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million servers, although the number of websites with PHP installed has declined since August 2005. It is also the most popular Apache module among computers using Apache as a web server. The most recent major release of PHP was version 5.2.6 on May 1, 2008.

You may visit Rasmus Lerdorf’s Personal home page .

MySQL

MYSQL is a multithreaded, multi-user SQL database management system (DBMS) which has more than 11 million installations. The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases.

MySQL, the most popular Open Source SQL database management system, is developed, distributed, and supported by MySQL AB. Ulf Michael Widenius (often called Monty)is the main author of the original version of the open-source MySQL database and a founding member of the MySQL AB company. MySQL AB is a commercial company, founded by the MySQL developers. It is a second generation Open Source company that unites Open Source values and methodology with a successful business model.

The MySQL Web site (http://www.mysql.com/) provides the latest information about MySQL software and MySQL AB.

Milestones in MySQL development include:

• MySQL was first released internally on 23 May 1995
• Windows version was released on January 8, 1998 for Windows 95 and NT
• Version 3.23: beta from June 2000, production release January 2001
• Version 4.0: beta from August 2002, production release March 2003 (unions)
• Version 4.1: beta from June 2004, production release October 2004 (R-trees and B-trees, subqueries, prepared statements)
• Version 5.0: beta from March 2005, production release October 2005 (cursors, stored procedures, triggers, views, XA transactions)
• Version 5.1: currently pre-production (since November 2005) (event scheduler, partitioning, plugin API, row-based replication, server log tables)
• Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB on 26 February 2008.

To administer MySQL databases one can use the included command-line tool (commands: mysql and mysqladmin). Also downloadable from the MySQL site are GUI administration tools: MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser. Both of the GUI tools are now included in one package called MySQL GUI Tools.

In addition to the above mentioned tools developed by MySQL AB, there are several other commercial and non-commercial tools available. phpMyAdmin is a free software webbased administration interface implemented in PHP.

MySQL AB Management Team. MySQL AB.

Monty: The First MySQL Fellow.

Ajax

Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a group of inter-related web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications. Ajax is not a programming language rather then it is a technology. Ajex is not a technology. Its really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax is a cross-platform technique usable on many different operating systems, computer architectures, and web browsers as it is based on open standards such as JavaScript and the DOM. There are free and open source implementations of suitable frameworks and libraries.

Jesse James Garrett at first give the name Ajax in his writing Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications published at 18 October, 2005. That means Ajex is only new by name, Google map and google suggest applications are made by Ajex before It comes to light. Ajex take its own name given by Garrett. Ajex is made by existing technologies (XHTML, CSS, DOM, XML, JavaScript) which always use for dynamic web development.

You can visit Jesse James Garrett.

jQuery

jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML. It was released January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig.

Dual licensed under the MIT License and the GNU General Public License, jQuery is free and open source software. jQuery exists as a single JavaScript file, containing all the common DOM, Event, Effects, and Ajax functions.

jQuery has two styles of interaction:

• via the $ function, which is a factory method for the jQuery object. These functions are chainable; they each return the jQuery object
• via $.-prefixed functions. These are functions which do not work in the jQuery object per se.

A typical workflow for manipulation of multiple DOM nodes begins with $ function being called with a CSS selector string, with results in the jQuery object referencing zero or more elements in the HTML page. This node set can be manipulated by applying instance methods to the jQuery object, or the nodes themselves can be manipulated.

jQuery contains the following features:

• DOM element selections
• DOM traversal and modification, (including support for CSS 1-3 and basic XPath)
• Events
• CSS manipulation
• Effects and animations
• Ajax
• Extensibility
• Utilities – such as browser version and the each function.
• JavaScript Plugins

Zend Framework

Zend Framework is an open source, object-oriented web application framework implemented in PHP 5 and licensed under the New BSD License. Zend Framework—often referred to as ZF—is developed with the goal of simplifying web development while promoting best practices in the PHP developer community.

Zend Framework was conceived in early 2005 while many new frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails and the Spring Framework, were gaining popularity in the web development community. ZF was publically announced at the first Zend Conference. At the same time, no widely used framework had been made available to the PHP community to fulfill similar web development needs. The designers of Zend Framework sought to combine the ease-of-use and rapid application development (RAD) features of these new frameworks with the simplicity, openness, and real-world practicality that is highly valued in the PHP community.

ZF’s use-at-will architecture allows developers to reuse components when and where they make sense in their applications without requiring other ZF components beyond minimal dependencies. There is therefore no single development paradigm or pattern that all Zend Framework users must follow, although ZF does provide components for the MVC and Table Gateway design patterns which are used in most ZF applications. Zend Framework provides individual components for many other common requirements in web application development, including authentication and authorization via access control lists (ACL), application configuration, data caching, filtering/validation of user-provided data for security and data integrity, internationalization, interfaces to AJAX functionality, email composition/delivery, Lucene-format search indexing and querying, and all Google Data APIs along with many other popular web services. Because of their loosely coupled design, ZF components can be used relatively easy alongside components from other PHP web application frameworks.

Python

Python was first created by Guido von Rossum in 1990 and was named after the Brit-com Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It has since been developed by a large team of volunteers and is freely available from the Python Software Foundation. The most recent version of Python, 2.5, was released in September, 2006.

Python is now found in many incarnations. At the website of the Python Software Foundation, Python is written in C. Other incarnations exist. A Java-based version of Python exists in Jython and may be used to work with Java code natively.

Iron Python, a C# version, exists for the .Net and Mono platforms and allows C# programmers access to Python’s power and flexibility. In each of these instances, Python is written in one language and works natively with that language; however, it also interacts very well with other languages through its many modules.

For purposes of research and development, there is also a Python implementation written in Python itself. The project PyPy was founded in 2003 in order to enable Python programmers to change the behaviour of the Python interpreter at will. While it is an open source project, being developed openly by a community of developers for free distribution and modification, PyPy is also supported by the European Union as a Specified Targeted Research Project (STReP), part of the FP6 funding program.