A Decade of PHP

As Zak kindly reminds us, it is the eve of PHP's tenth birthday. My first involvement with PHP was as an alternative to ASP for a client in Japan; they wanted a dynamic web site, but it had to run on their Solaris servers. At that time, PHP 4 was still in beta, but already felt superior to ASP. As that project grew, I felt that it would be cool if I could use fsockopen() to talk to a credit card payment processor.

In September of 2000 I came up with a crude patch that got SSL to work with fsockopen(). I went on to refine this patch (a great deal!) and wound up implementing the Streams layer.

I've always been surprised and impressed at how easily my contributions were accepted by the PHP project, especially because the patch to enable streams was so wide-ranging (it touched pretty much every file in the source tree), and even more so because I'd never previously met anyone from the PHP project, either in real life or even just "around" online.

Getting involved with PHP has had a profound effect on my life; being invited to speak at conferences in Holland, Germany, USA, the Carribean, Toronto and more recently in Mexico has been a hell of an experience. And I mustn't forget that I wouldn't be working here with George Schlossnagle at OmniTI, on a different continent from where I was born, if it wasn't for PHP.

I owe the majority of my salary over the last few years to PHP, and so I want to send my thanks to Rasmus for getting the ball rolling, keeping it rolling, and pimping my name when I was looking for work. I'd also like to extend my thanks to Christine; based on the reactions of my own wife (Juliette) to some of the PHP things I've done (and that's nothing compared to Rasmus), I have some idea of how much effort you must have put out over the years. Thanks to you both!

Long live PHP :-)

PS: thanks to everyone that has contributed to the PHP project over the years.