We live in a fast-paced world. Looking over the last decade, the world has changed so radically - politically, economically and culturally - that it’s difficult to believe only 10 years have passed. Technology is certainly no exception. It’s easy to overlook the huge changes in the way technology is used in our daily lives - because technology tends to evolve in small little steps as opposed to one radical revolution. Looking backwards over a period of ten years provides a great perspective. The Internet has become so pervasive that the lives of many people today revolve around it throughout the day. They don’t have to be computer geeks to spend hours and hours online - the Internet, in its various forms of consumption is simply their second nature - much like the phone was in the past. Even people who don’t live their social lives on the Internet still use it as their medium of choice for performing many tasks - such as finding directions, buying goods, finding product descriptions or reading news. It is therefore quite obvious that the demand forWeb-based solutions is booming with the possibilities truly being endless.

PHP was created in a brink of this new era, and while I can’t say we knew exactly what was going to happen - I’m quite proud we took the right decisions that in turn made PHP one of the biggest enablers of this modern Web (r)evolution. I’ve heard many ideas from many people that tried to understand what is it about PHP that makes it so successful - its performance, excellent database support, support for protocols, its multi-platform support, and many other technical advantages. While there’s truth to all of them, in my opinion they are minor contributors. I believe that there are just two key ingredients to PHP’s success - Simplicity - being the technological advantage, and the Community that was built around it - that provided a huge social advantage.