Short answers, pulled from the story.
Aladdin was added to One Thousand and One Nights by the French translator Antoine Galland, based on a tale he heard from the Syrian storyteller Hanna Diyab. The story was not part of the original collection and has no authentic Arabic textual source. Scholars Ruth B. Bottigheimer and Paulo Lemos Horta have argued Hanna Diyab should be understood as the original author.
Aladdin was published in 1710 in volumes ix and x of Antoine Galland's Nights. Galland's diary records that he transcribed the tale for publication in the winter of 1709 to 1710, with no published acknowledgment of Hanna Diyab's contribution.
Both the Galland and Burton versions open in "one of the cities of China," but nearly everything else fits a Middle Eastern setting, with a ruler called Sultan, Muslim characters, and Muslim platitudes. Early Arabic usage of China is known to have designated, in an abstract sense, an exotic, faraway land, and a folk-tale teller might not have possessed real knowledge of China.
Badroulbadour means "full moon of full moons," using the full moon as a metaphor for female beauty common in Arabic literature and across the Arabian Nights. She is the princess Aladdin marries, renamed Jasmine and made an Arabian princess in Disney's Aladdin.
Aladdin is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 561, named after the character. It sits beside ATU 560, The Magic Ring, and ATU 562, The Spirit in the Blue Light, all involving a poor boy or soldier who finds a wish-granting magical item.
Disney's 1992 Aladdin combined the Sorcerer and the Sultan's vizier into one character named Jafar, renamed the princess Jasmine, and moved the setting from China to the fictional Arabian city of Agrabah. The names Jafar and Abu were borrowed from the 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad, and the plot structure was simplified.