PHP is a server-side scripting language
designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming
language. As of January 2013, PHP was installed on more than 240 million websites
(39% of those sampled) and 2.1 million web servers. Originally created by Rasmus
Lerdorf in 1994, the reference implementation of PHP (powered by the Zend
Engine) is now produced by The PHP Group. While PHP originally stood for Personal
Home Page, it now stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, which is a
recursive backronym.
PHP
code can be simply mixed with HTML code, or it can be used in combination with
various templating engines and web frameworks. PHP code is usually processed by
a PHP interpreter, which is usually implemented as a web server's native module
or a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executable. After the PHP code is
interpreted and executed, the web server sends resulting output to its client,
usually in form of a part of the generated web page; for example, PHP code can
generate a web page's HTML code, an image, or some other data. PHP has also
evolved to include a command-line interface (CLI) capability and can be used in
standalone graphical applications.
The
canonical PHP interpreter, powered by the Zend Engine, is free software
released under the PHP License. PHP has been widely ported and can be deployed
on most web servers on almost every operating system and platform, free of
charge.
Despite
its popularity, no written specification or standard existed for the PHP
language until 2014, leaving the canonical PHP interpreter as a de facto
standard. Since 2014, there is ongoing work on creating a formal PHP
specification.
History
PHP
development began in 1994 when Rasmus Lerdorf wrote a series of Common Gateway
Interface (CGI) binaries in C, which he used to maintain his personal homepage.
He extended them to add the ability to work with web forms and to communicate
with databases, and called this implementation "Personal Home Page/Forms
Interpreter" or PHP/FI.
PHP/FI
could be used to build simple, dynamic web applications. Lerdorf initially
announced the release of PHP/FI as "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)
version 1.0" publicly to accelerate bug location and improve the code, on
the Usenet discussion group comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi on June
8, 1995. This release already had the basic functionality that PHP has as of
2013. This included Perl-like variables, form handling, and the ability to
embed HTML. The syntax resembled that of Perl but was simpler, more limited and
less consistent.
Early
PHP was not intended to be a new programming language, and grew organically,
with Lerdorf noting in retrospect: "I don’t know how to stop it, there was
never any intent to write a programming language […] I have absolutely no idea
how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step
on the way." A development team began to form and, after months of work
and beta testing, officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997.
One
criticism of PHP is that it was not originally designed, but instead it was
developed organically; among other things, this has led to inconsistent naming
of functions and inconsistent ordering of their parameters.In some cases, the
function names were chosen to match the lower-level libraries which PHP was
"wrapping", while in some very early versions of PHP the
length of the function names was used internally as a hash function, so names
were chosen to improve the distribution of hash values.
Zeev
Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP
3, changing the language's name to the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext
Preprocessor. Afterwards, 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. They also founded Zend
Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel.
On
May 22, 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released.As of August
2008 this branch reached version 4.4.9. PHP 4 is no longer under development
nor will any security updates be released.
On
July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by the new Zend Engine II. PHP 5
included new features such as improved support for object-oriented programming,
the PHP Data Objects (PDO) extension (which defines a lightweight and
consistent interface for accessing databases), and numerous performance
enhancements. In 2008 PHP 5 became the only stable version under development. Late
static binding had been missing from PHP and was added in version 5.3.
Many
high-profile open-source projects ceased to support PHP 4 in new code as of
February 5, 2008, because of the GoPHP5 initiative, provided by a consortium of
PHP developers promoting the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5.
Over
time, PHP interpreters became available on most existing 32-bit and 64-bit
operating systems, either by building them from the PHP source code, or by
using pre-built binaries. For the PHP versions 5.3 and 5.4, the only available Microsoft
Windows binary distributions were 32-bit x86 builds, requiring Windows 32-bit
compatibility mode while using Internet Information Services (IIS) on a 64-bit
Windows platform. PHP version 5.5 made the 64-bit x86-64 builds available for
Microsoft Windows.
PHP 6 and Unicode
PHP
received mixed reviews due to lacking native Unicode
support at the core language level. In 2005, a project headed by Andrei
Zmievski was initiated to bring native Unicode support throughout PHP, by
embedding the International
Components for Unicode
(ICU) library, and representing text strings as UTF-16
internally.Since this would cause major changes both to the internals of the
language and to user code, it was planned to release this as version 6.0 of the
language, along with other major features then in development.
However,
a shortage of developers who understood the necessary changes, and performance
problems arising from conversion to and from UTF-16, which is rarely used in a
web context, led to delays in the project. As a result, a PHP 5.3 release
was created in 2009, with many non-Unicode features back-ported from
PHP 6, notably namespaces. In March 2010, the project in its current form
was officially abandoned, and a PHP 5.4 release was prepared containing
most remaining non-Unicode features from PHP 6, such as traits and closure
re-binding. Initial hopes were that a new plan would be formed for Unicode
integration, but as of 2014 none has been adopted.
PHP 7
As
of 2014, work is underway on a new major PHP version named PHP 7. There
was some dispute as to whether the next major version of PHP was to be called
PHP 6 or PHP 7. While the PHP 6 unicode experiment had never
been released, a number of articles and book titles referenced the old
PHP 6 name, which might have caused confusion if a new release were to
reuse the PHP 6 name.After a vote, the name PHP 7 was chosen.
PHP 7
gets its foundations from an experimental PHP branch
that was originally named phpng (PHP next generation), which aims
at optimizing PHP performance by refactoring the Zend Engine while retaining
near-complete language compatibility. As of 14 July 2014, WordPress-based benchmarks, which serve as the main benchmark
suite for phpng project, show an almost 100% increase in performance. Changes
from phpng are also expected to make it easier to improve performance in the
future, as more compact data structures and other changes are seen as better
suited for a successful migration to a just-in-time (JIT) compiler.Because of the
significant changes, this reworked Zend Engine will be called Zend
Engine 3, succeeding the Zend Engine 2 used in PHP 5.
In
terms of new language features, PHP 7 will add features such as return
type declarations,which will complement its existing parameter type
declarations, and will add support for the scalar types (integer, float, string
and boolean) in parameter and return type declarations. PHP 7 will also
contain an improved variable syntax which is internally consistent and
complete, resolving a long-standing issue in PHP, what will allow use of
->, [], (), {}, and :: operators with arbitrary meaningful
left-hand-side expressions.
Release
history
Key
Color
|
Meaning
|
Development
|
Red
|
Old
release
|
No
development
|
Yellow
|
Stable
release
|
Security
fixes
|
Green
|
Stable
release
|
Bugand
security fixes
|
Blue
|
Future
release
|
New
features
|
Version
|
Release
date
|
Supported
until
|
1.0
|
8
june 1995
|
|
2.0
|
1
November 1997
|
|
3.0
|
6
June 1998
|
20
October 2000
|
4.0
|
22
May 2000
|
23
June 2001
|
4.1
|
10
December 2001
|
12
March 2002
|
4.2
|
22
April 2002
|
6
September 2002
|
4.3
|
27
December 2002
|
31
March 2005
|
4.4
|
11
July 2005
|
7
August 2008
|
5.0
|
13
July 2004
|
5
September 2005
|
5.1
|
24
November 2005
|
24 August
2006
|
5.2
|
2
November 2006
|
6
January 2011
|
5.3
|
30
June 2009
|
14
August 2014
|
5.4
|
1
March 2012
|
September
2015
|
5.5
|
20
June 2013
|
June 2016
|
5.6
|
28
August 2014
|
August
2017
|
7.0
|
Mid
October 2015
|
Mid
October 2018
|
Beginning
on June 28, 2011, the PHP Group began following a timeline for when new
versions of PHP will be released. Under this timeline, at least one release
should occur every month. Once per year, a minor release should occur which can
include new features. Every minor release should at least have two years of
security and bug fixes, followed by at least one year of security-only fixes,
for a total of a three-year release process for every minor release. No new
features (unless small and self-contained) will be introduced into a minor
release during the three-year release process.
Syntax
The
following Hello world program is written in PHP code embedded in an HTML
document:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>PHP Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php echo '<p>Hello World</p>'; ?>
</body>
</html>
However,
as PHP does not need to be embedded in HTML or used with a web server, the
simplest version of a Hello World program can be written like this, with the
closing tag omitted as preferred in files containing pure PHP code (prior to
PHP 5.4.0, this short syntax for echo()
only works with the short_open_tag
configuration setting enabled, while for PHP 5.4.0 and later it is always
available):
<?= 'Hello world';
The
PHP interpreter only executes PHP code within its delimiters. Anything outside
its delimiters is not processed by PHP (although non-PHP text is still subject
to control structures described in PHP code). The most common delimiters are
<?php to open and ?> to close PHP sections. <script
language="php">
and </script> delimiters are also available, as are
the shortened forms <? or <?= (which is used to echo back a string
or variable) and ?> as well as ASP-style short forms <% or <%= and %>. Short delimiters make script files
less portable, since support for them can be disabled in the local PHP
configuration, and they are therefore discouraged. The purpose of all these
delimiters is to separate PHP code from non-PHP code, including HTML.
The
first form of delimiters,
<?php and ?>, in XHTML and other XML documents,
creates correctly formed XML "processing instructions". This means
that the resulting mixture of PHP code and other markup in the server-side file
is itself well-formed XML.
Variables
are prefixed with a dollar symbol, and a type does not need to be specified in
advance. PHP 5 introduced type hinting that allows functions to
force their parameters to be objects of a specific class, arrays, interfaces or
callback functions. However, type hints can not be used with scalar types such
as integer or string.
Unlike
function and class names, variable names are case sensitive. Both double-quoted
(
"") and heredoc strings provide the
ability to interpolate a variable's value into the string. PHP treats newlines
as whitespace in the manner of a free-form language, and statements are
terminated by a semicolon. PHP has three types of comment syntax: /*
*/ marks block and
inline comments; // as well as # are used for one-line comments. The echo
statement is one of several facilities PHP provides to output text, e.g.,
to a web browser.
In
terms of keywords and language syntax, PHP is similar to most high level
languages that follow the C style syntax.
if conditions, for and while loops, and function returns are
similar in syntax to languages such as C, C++, C#, Java and Perl.Data types
PHP
stores whole numbers in a platform-dependent range, either a 64-bit or 32-bit signed
integer equivalent to the C-language long type. Unsigned integers are converted
to signed values in certain situations; this behavior is different from other
programming languages. Integer variables can be assigned using decimal
(positive and negative), octal, hexadecimal, and binary notations.
Floating
point numbers are also stored in a platform-specific range. They can be
specified using floating point notation, or two forms of scientific notation.
PHP has a native Boolean type that is similar to the native Boolean types in Java
and C++. Using the Boolean type conversion rules, non-zero values are
interpreted as true and zero as false, as in perl and C++.
The
null data type represents a variable that has no value; NULL is the only
allowed value for this data type.
Variables
of the "resource" type represent references to resources from
external sources. These are typically created by functions from a particular
extension, and can only be processed by functions from the same extension;
examples include file, image, and database resources.
Arrays
can contain elements of any type that PHP can handle, including resources,
objects, and even other arrays. Order is preserved in lists of values and in hashes
with both keys and values, and the two can be intermingled. PHP also supports strings,
which can be used with single quotes, double quotes, nowdoc or heredoc syntax.
The
Standard PHP Library (SPL) attempts to solve standard problems and implements
efficient data access interfaces and classes.
Functions
PHP
has hundreds of functions provided by the core language functionality and
thousands more available via various extensions; these functions are well
documented in the online PHP documentation. However, the built-in library has a
wide variety of naming conventions and associated inconsistencies, as described
under history above.
Additional
functions can be defined by the developer:
function myAge($birthYear) // defines a function, this one is named "myAge"
{
$yearsOld = date('Y') - $birthYear; // calculates the age
return $yearsOld . ' year' . ($yearsOld != 1 ? 's' : ''); // returns the age in a descriptive form
}
echo 'I am currently ' . myAge(1981) . ' old.'; // outputs the text concatenated
// with the return value of myAge()
// As the result of this syntax, myAge() is called.
// In 2015, the output of this sample program will be 'I am currently 34 years old.'
In
PHP, normal functions are not first-class and can only be referenced by their
name directly, or dynamically by a variable containing the name of the function
(referred to as "variable functions"). User-defined functions can be
created at any time without being prototyped.Functions can be defined inside
code blocks, permitting a run-time decision as to whether or not a function
should be defined. Function calls must use parentheses, with the exception of
zero-argument class constructor functions called with the PHP
new operator, where parentheses are
optional.
Until
PHP 5.3, support for true anonymous functions or closures did not exist in PHP.
While
create_function() exists since PHP 4.0.1, it is merely
a thin wrapper around eval() that allows normal PHP functions to
be created during program execution. Also, support for variable functions
allows normal PHP functions to be used, for example, as callbacks or within function
tables. PHP 5.3 added support for closures, which are true anonymous,
first-class functions, whose syntax can be seen in the following example:function getAdder($x)
{
return function($y) use ($x)
{
return $x + $y;
};
}
$adder = getAdder(8);
echo $adder(2); // prints "10"
Objects
Basic
object-oriented programming functionality was added in PHP 3 and improved in
PHP 4. Object handling was completely rewritten for PHP 5, expanding the
feature set and enhancing performance. In previous versions of PHP, objects
were handled like value types. The drawback of this method was that the whole
object was copied when a variable was assigned or passed as a parameter to a
method. In the new approach, objects are referenced by handle, and not by
value.
PHP
5 introduced private and protected member variables and methods, along with abstract
classes, final classes, abstract methods, and final methods. It also introduced
a standard way of declaring constructors and destructors, similar to that of
other object-oriented languages such as C++, and a standard exception handling
model. Furthermore, PHP 5 added interfaces and allowed for multiple interfaces
to be implemented. There are special interfaces that allow objects to interact
with the runtime system. Objects implementing ArrayAccess can be used with array
syntax and objects implementing Iterator or IteratorAggregate can be used with
the
foreach language construct. There is no virtual
table feature in the engine, so static variables are bound with a name instead
of a reference at compile time.
If
the developer creates a copy of an object using the reserved word
clone, the Zend engine will check whether a
__clone() method has been defined. If not, it
will call a default __clone() which will copy the object's
properties. If a __clone() method is defined, then it will be
responsible for setting the necessary properties in the created object. For
convenience, the engine will supply a function that imports the properties of
the source object, so the programmer can start with a by-value replica of the
source object and only override properties that need to be changed.
The
visibility of PHP properties and methods is defined using the keywords
public,
private, and protected.
The default is public, if only var is used; var
is a synonym for public. Items declared public
can be accessed everywhere. protected
limits access to inherited classes (and to the class that defines the item). private
limits visibility only to the class that defines the item. Objects of the same
type have access to each other's private and protected members even though they
are not the same instance. PHP's member visibility features have sometimes been
described as "highly useful." However, they have also sometimes been
described as "at best irrelevant and at worst positively harmful."Implementations
The
original, only complete and most widely used PHP implementation is powered by
the Zend Engine and known simply as PHP. To disambiguate it from other
implementations, it is sometimes unofficially referred to as "Zend
PHP". The Zend Engine compiles PHP source code on-the-fly into an internal
format that it can execute, thus it works as an interpreter. It is also the
"reference implementation" of PHP, as PHP has no formal
specification, and so the semantics of Zend PHP define the semantics of PHP
itself. Due to the complex and nuanced semantics of PHP, defined by how Zend
works, it is difficult for competing implementations to offer complete
compatibility.
PHP's
single-request-per-script-execution model, and the fact the Zend Engine is an
interpreter, lead to inefficiency. As a result, various products have been
developed to help improve PHP performance. In order to speed up execution time
and not have to compile the PHP source code every time the web page is
accessed, PHP scripts can also be deployed in the PHP engine's internal format
by using an opcode cache, which works by caching the compiled form of a PHP
script (opcodes) in shared memory to avoid the overhead of parsing and compiling
the code every time the script runs. An opcode cache, Zend Opcache, is built
into PHP since version 5.5. Another example of a widely used opcode cache is
the Alternative PHP Cache (APC), which is available as a PECL extension.
While
Zend PHP is still the most popular implementation, several other
implementations have been developed. Some of these are compilers or support JIT
compilation, and hence offer performance benefits over Zend PHP at the expense
of lacking full PHP compatibility. Alternative implementations include the
following:
- HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) – developed at Facebook and available as open source, it converts PHP code into a high-level bytecode (commonly known as an intermediate language), which is then translated into x86-64 machine code dynamically at runtime by a just-in-time (JIT) compiler, resulting in up to 6× performance improvements.
- Parrot – a virtual machine designed to run dynamic languages efficiently; Pipp transforms the PHP source code into the Parrot intermediate representation, which is then translated into the Parrot's bytecode and executed by the virtual machine.
- Phalanger – compiles PHP into Common Intermediate Language (CIL) bytecode
- HipHop – developed at Facebook and available as open source, it transforms the PHP scripts into C++ code and then compiles the resulting code, reducing the server load up to 50%. In early 2013, Facebook deprecated it in favor of HHVM due to multiple reasons, including deployment difficulties and lack of support for the whole PHP language, including the create_function() and eval() constructs.
Licensing
PHP
is free software released under the PHP License, which stipulates that:
Products
derived from this software may not be called "PHP", nor may
"PHP" appear in their name, without prior written permission from
group@php.net. You may indicate that your software works in conjunction with
PHP by saying "Foo for PHP" instead of calling it "PHP Foo"
or "phpfoo".
This
restriction on use of the name PHP makes the PHP License incompatible
with the GNU General Public License (GPL), while the Zend License is
incompatible due to an advertising clause similar to that of the original
license of BSD.
Development and community
PHP
includes various free and open-source libraries in its source distribution, or
uses them in resulting PHP binary builds. PHP is fundamentally an Internet-aware
system with built-in modules for accessing File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers
and many database servers, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server
and SQLite (which is an embedded database), LDAP servers, and others. Numerous
functions familiar to C programmers, such as those in the stdio family, are
available in standard PHP builds.
PHP
allows developers to write extensions in C to add functionality to the PHP
language. PHP extensions can be compiled statically into PHP or loaded
dynamically at runtime. Numerous extensions have been written to add support
for the Windows API, process management on Unix-like operating systems,
multibyte strings (Unicode), cURL, and several popular compression formats.
Other PHP features made available through extensions include integration with IRC,
dynamic generation of images and Adobe Flash content, PHP Data Objects
(PDO) as an abstraction layer used for accessing databases, and even speech
synthesis. Some of the language's core functions, such as those dealing with
strings and arrays, are also implemented as extensions.The PHP Extension
Community Library (PECL) project is a repository for extensions to the PHP
language
Some
other projects, such as Zephir, provide the ability for PHP extensions
to be created in a high-level language and compiled into native PHP extensions.
Such an approach, instead of writing PHP extensions directly in C, simplifies
the development of extensions and reduces the time required for programming and
testing.
Zend
Technologies provides a certification exam for programmers to become certified
PHP developers.
Installation and configuration
There
are two primary ways for adding support for PHP to a web server – as a native
web server module, or as a CGI executable. PHP has a direct module interface
called Server Application Programming Interface (SAPI), which is supported by
many web servers including Apache HTTP Server, Microsoft IIS, Netscape (now
defunct) and iPlanet. Some other web servers, such as OmniHTTPd, support the Internet
Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI), which is a Microsoft's web
server module interface. If PHP has no module support for a web server, it can
always be used as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) or FastCGI processor; in
that case, the web server is configured to use PHP's CGI executable to process
all requests to PHP files.
PHP-FPM
(FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative FastCGI implementation for PHP,
bundled with the official PHP distribution since version 5.3.3. When compared
to the older FastCGI implementation, it contains some additional features,
mostly useful for heavily loaded web servers.
When
using PHP for command-line scripting, a PHP command-line interface (CLI)
executable is needed. PHP supports a CLI SAPI as of PHP 4.3.0. The main focus
of this SAPI is developing shell applications using PHP. There are quite a few
differences between the CLI SAPI and other SAPIs, although they do share many
of the same behaviors.
PHP
can also be used for writing desktop graphical user interface (GUI)
applications, by using the PHP-GTK extension. PHP-GTK is not included in the
official PHP distribution, and as an extension it can be used only with PHP
versions 5.1.0 and newer. The most common way of installing PHP-GTK is
compiling it from the source code.
When
PHP is installed and used in cloud environments, software development kits
(SDKs) are provided for using cloud-specific features. For example:
- Amazon Web Services provides the AWS SDK for PHP
- Windows Azure can be used with the Windows Azure SDK for PHP.
Numerous
configuration options are supported, affecting both core PHP features and
extensions. Configuration file
php.ini
is searched for in different locations, depending on the way PHP is used. The
configuration file is split into various sections, while some of the
configuration options can be also set within the web server configuration.Use
PHP
is a general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to server-side
web development, in which case PHP generally runs on a web server. Any PHP code
in a requested file is executed by the PHP runtime, usually to create dynamic
web page content or dynamic images used on websites or elsewhere.It can also be
used for command-line scripting and client-side graphical user interface (GUI)
applications. PHP can be deployed on most web servers, many operating systems
and platforms, and can be used with many relational database management systems
(RDBMS). Most web hosting providers support PHP for use by their clients. It is
available free of charge, and the PHP Group provides the complete source code
for users to build, customize and extend for their own use.
PHP
acts primarily as a filter, taking input from a file or stream containing text
and/or PHP instructions and outputting another stream of data. Most commonly
the output will be HTML, although it could be JSON, XML or binary data such as
image or audio formats. Since PHP 4, the PHP parser compiles input to produce bytecode
for processing by the Zend Engine, giving improved performance over its interpreter
predecessor.
Originally
designed to create dynamic web pages, PHP now focuses mainly on server-side
scripting, and it is similar to other server-side scripting languages that
provide dynamic content from a web server to a client, such as Microsoft's ASP.NET,
Sun Microsystems' JavaServer Pages, and mod_perl.
PHP has also attracted the development of many software frameworks that provide
building blocks and a design structure to promote rapid application development
(RAD). Some of these include PRADO, CakePHP, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Yii
Framework, Phalcon and Zend Framework, offering features similar to other web
application frameworks.
The
LAMP architecture has become popular in the web industry as a way of deploying
web applications. PHP is commonly used as the P in this bundle alongside
Linux, Apache and MySQL, although the P may also refer to Python, Perl,
or some mix of the three. Similar packages, WAMP and MAMP, are also available
for Windows and OS X, with the first letter standing for the respective
operating system. Although both PHP and Apache are provided as part of the Mac
OS X base install, users of these packages seek a simpler installation
mechanism that can be more easily kept up to date.
As
of April 2007, over 20 million Internet domains had web services hosted on
servers with PHP installed and mod_php was recorded as the most popular Apache
HTTP Server module. As of October 2010, PHP was used as the server-side
programming language on 75% of all websites whose server-side programming
language was known (as of February 2014, the percentage had reached 82%), and
PHP was the most-used open source software within enterprises. Web content
management systems written in PHP include MediaWiki, Joomla,eZ Publish, SilverStripe,
WordPress, Drupal, Moodle, the user-facing portion of Facebook, and Digg.
For
specific and more advanced usage scenarios, PHP offers a well defined and
documented way for writing custom extensions in C or C++. Besides extending the
language itself in form of additional libraries, extensions are providing a way
for improving execution speed where it is critical and there is room for
improvements by using a true compiled language. PHP also offers well defined
ways for embedding itself into other software projects. That way PHP can be
easily used as an internal scripting language for another project, also
providing tight interfacing with the project's specific internal data
structures.
PHP
received mixed reviews due to lacking support for multithreading at the core
language level, though using threads is made possible by the
"pthreads" PECL extension.
Security
In
2013, 9% of all vulnerabilities listed by the National Vulnerability Database
were linked to PHP; historically, about 30% of all vulnerabilities listed since
1996 in this database are linked to PHP. Technical security flaws of the
language itself or of its core libraries are not frequent (22 in 2009, about 1%
of the total although PHP applies to about 20% of programs listed). Recognizing
that programmers make mistakes, some languages include taint checking to
automatically detect the lack of input validation which induces many issues.
Such a feature is being developed for PHP, but its inclusion into a release has
been rejected several times in the past. There are advanced protection patches
such as Suhosin and Hardening-Patch, especially designed for web hosting
environments.There are certain language features and configuration parameters
(primarily the default values for such runtime settings) that make PHP prone to
security issues. Among these, magic_quotes_gpc
and register_globals configuration directives are the best
known; the latter made any URL parameters become PHP variables, opening a path
for serious security vulnerabilities by allowing an attacker to set the value
of any uninitialized global variable and interfere with the execution of a PHP
script. Support for "magic quotes" and "register globals"
has been deprecated as of PHP 5.3.0, and removed as of PHP 5.4.0.
Another
example for the runtime settings vulnerability comes from failing to disable
PHP execution (via engine configuration directive) for the
directory where uploaded images are stored; leaving the default settings can
result in execution of malicious PHP code embedded within the uploaded images.
Also, leaving enabled the dynamic loading of PHP extensions (via enable_dl configuration directive) in a shared
web hosting environment can lead to security issues.

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