PHP is a server-side scripting language that was created by Rasmus Lerdoff in 1994 and released in 1998. Major versions include PHP 3 in 1998, PHP 4 in 2000 which improved speed and reliability, and PHP 5 in 2004 which added improved object-oriented programming support. The latest version is PHP 7.4 released in 2019. PHP is an open source language that is widely used for web development due to its ease of use, flexibility, and built-in support for connecting to databases. It allows placing PHP code into HTML files which is then executed on the server and plain HTML is sent to browsers.