Andi on Web & IT

ZendCon wrap-up and welcome phpcloud.com!

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 20:15:00 +0000

We just wrapped up the 7th ZendCon event last week in Santa Clara, and the enthusiasm of the PHP community was inspiring. PHP is gaining momentum across industries and geographies, powering the web, helping people build amazing apps with ease, proficiency and creativity. In so many ways, PHP is making a difference, from legacy modernization to mobile app development and cloud deployments. And PHP is the basis for Drupal CMS, Magento e-commerce, Joomla and Wordpress, platforms used by millions of people. It is gratifying to see the innovation in our community, which is now about 5 million developers strong, and Zend is proud to be part of it, with the introduction of phpcloud.com – which is like a triple play in the cloud.

First up is Zend Developer Cloud, a sandbox where PHP developers can get started and develop great apps with no need to build a PHP stack or spend time maintaining a PHP environment. They’re literally just a few clicks away from productive coding in Zend Developer Cloud. This represents a step function in improved productivity similar to what Web application frameworks delivered 6 years ago. Unlike many other cloud platform providers, Zend is clearly placing a major emphasis on development, which is where we believe successful cloud initiatives begin, and where customers are investing time and resources for the greatest benefit.

Here, developers can really work together in the cloud, creating containers and snapshots of their app stacks so others can join a project in progress, and collaborate productively. Troubleshooting and enabling the development of high quality code is also a major focus and the Zend Developer Cloud provides powerful tools such as our code tracing technology, and browser integration to deliver proactive alerts while developers are writing and testing code. We want to cater to all PHP developers, who may use everything from vim to Zend Studio. For those who use Zend Studio, we’ve integrated it with Zend Developer Cloud to make the developer experience seamless. Like other editors or IDEs? The open source Zend SDK will enable Eclipse PDT and other tools to be integrated with Zend Developer Cloud.

Next up is production, where the Zend Application Fabric provides an elastic, highly available platform with a complete stack — PHP runtime, a full range of extensions, and Zend Framework. Zend Application Fabric is powered by Zend Server to provide the PHP application monitoring and code tracing that developers have come to rely on. The ability to find and fix issues quickly without having to recreate them means that precious time once spent on troubleshooting can be refocused on coding. And third is a strong partner ecosystem. For developers who work in the Zend Developer Cloud, their code will be ready to deploy to any cloud that supports the Zend Application Fabric. This includes partnering with Amazon Web Services, Rightscale, Rackspace and IBM SmartCloud today, and more to come. And, developed apps can also be deployed on-premise with Zend Server to take full advantage of automated on-premise deployment and delivery benefits.

As we enter this new era of productivity and choice for Web developers, Zend will continue to innovate and build on a fully integrated and seamless development experience, delivering the best, elastic application platform and working with a strong partner ecosystem to deliver a cloud runtime environment where and when you want it.

Happy PHP’ing!!

Easily build cross-platform, native mobile apps (iOS, Android, Blackberry)

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 18:55:00 +0000

Last month I blogged about the release of Adobe Flash Builder for PHP 4.5. Today Adobe released version 4.5.1 which completes last month’s launch with optimized iOS (iPhone/iPad) and Blackberry support!

It seems many people have been confused re: what iOS support really means. Let me clarify. This is not about when you’d choose Flash vs. HTML 5 in the browser. The product does support targeting Flash in the browser but what excites me the most is the availability of the Flex framework for delivering native mobile experiences on iOS, Android and other devices. It addresses one of the biggest pain points our customers have with mobility and I see no one else on the market addressing it in such a complete manner (although many are addressing various aspects of the problem).

Adobe has done a great job in making it dead simple to deliver native mobile apps. They have delivered on strong IDE-based tooling, a very extensive application framework (Flex) and great runtime performance making it run at near native speeds on a broad range of devices. Best of all, the deep integration with PHP & Zend Studio enables us to deliver a strong client (Air)-server(PHP) development experience. All at really compelling price points!

So how does iOS support work? Adobe cross compiles to native ARM machine code. These apps are self contained, can be distributed via the Apple Store and perform well.

As mentioned earlier, today we are shipping 4.5.1 which completes iOS & Blackberry support. Get your 60 day trial - http://www.adobe.com/products/flash-builder-php.html

Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP is now available!

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Tue, 03 May 2011 05:46:00 +0000

As I recently noted, we have teamed with Adobe to deliver a solution for developers to rapidly deliver native, connected mobile applications. This joint solution based on Adobe Flash Builder, Zend Studio and Adobe AIR enables users to use a common code base and target multiple devices including iOS, Android and Blackberry. Passed are the days where you have to learn Objective-C, Java and other native frameworks.

A recent research report noted that the # of Mobile app downloads will reach 44 billion by 2016. That coupled with the fact that Apple has already paid out over $2 billion to developers for apps sold on the App Store creates a compelling story for a solution that helps developers leverage Web skills and an easy to use visual builder to deliver internet connected applications across devices.

Check it out at Zend.com’s product page or Adobe.com’s product page.

Zend and RightScale Deliver a Customizable PHP PaaS: Deploy and Scale Industrial Strength PHP in the Cloud of Your Choice

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:01:00 +0000

The industry is going through a major reset as a result of Cloud Computing. Economies of scale, driven by public Cloud infrastructures in conjunction with pay-as-you-go pricing models, create a very strong motivating factor for companies to move more of their workloads into the Cloud. In addition, Cloud promises to deliver unprecedented agility and time-to-market which makes it all the more appealing.

Today, more than 35% of the Web workload runs on PHP (some believe it is closer to 55%). It is therefore not surprising that RightScale, the cloud management leader that powers the likes of Zynga, has reported that more than 37% of its customers are running PHP in the Cloud (PHP ranks as the #1 language among RightScale customers).

These synergies brought RightScale and Zend together in 2010, focused on delivering a best-of-breed PHP Cloud offering. At that time, we introduced the RightScale Zend Dev & Test Pack to enable PHP developers to get started quickly with a pilot project in the cloud. Today, we’re introducing the RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack to deliver PHP for production in the Cloud.

We have aligned the development of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) with the needs of our existing and future customers, and defined key tenets for the Zend PHP Cloud Application Platform including:

- Multi-Cloud – We believe the market is looking for a consistent PHP application platform across multiple-cloud environments including public and private environments.

- Application Centricity – No matter what underlying resources are serving the application, the need for application-centric deployment and management is fundamental to how our customers want to run their workloads.

- Application Lifecycle – Achieving operational excellence and predictability requires strong consistency from development to testing to staging and production and a capable agile process to push new functionality into the market quickly.

- Portability – Cloud native applications should be fully portable across cloud infrastructures.

- Elasticity – Cloud platforms should automatically scale up and down, on-demand based on workload to ensure optimal user experience and help reduce infrastructure costs.

- Flexibility – Businesses have broadly varying workloads, business requirements and application preferences. We want to ensure users can customize their platform to fit their business needs.

RightScale’s experience in Cloud and Zend’s experience in PHP combine to deliver the most pragmatic and broadly applicable PHP platform that ensures success for customers who want to develop and deploy fault-tolerant, scalable and manageable PHP infrastructures in the Cloud.

The following are some examples of how we jointly address the above tenets with RightScale providing the infrastructure management capabilities and Zend focusing at the application development layer:

- Multi-cloud – RightScale is a multi-cloud management platform. While Amazon has been the focus, by year-end RightScale will, at minimum, have added support for the Rackspace Cloud and Cloud.com. Zend, in turn, will deliver a completely consistent PHP experience across these multiple Cloud environments.

- Portability – RightScale enables portability of infrastructure recipes and management such as load balancers, the Zend PHP Cloud Application Platform, database and other infrastructure components across multiple Cloud environments. Zend leads the Simple Cloud API project, which enables portability at the application level.

- Elasticity – RightScale has experience in monitoring and scaling-up applications that run on thousands of servers, including the provisioning and managing highly available infrastructure components. This tweet exemplifies how RightScale scaled-out a Web site to meet peak demand. Zend, too, has expertise in delivering scalable and highly-available fault-tolerant PHP environments for customers including NYSE Euronext, GE, BNP Paribas and others. Our platform supports scale up and down in the Cloud and addresses configuration, fault tolerance and other important aspects of elastic environments.

Through tight integration of RightScale and Zend technologies, with a click of a button, customers can launch highly-available virtual PHP infrastructures that include HA load balancing, HA MySQL and HA Zend PHP Cloud Application Platform (powered by 8 virtual servers). It is very cool stuff and really exemplifies the promise of cloud computing.

Our PaaS solution enables customers to ‘lift the hood’ and tweak the templates behind these infrastructures. For example, a development team may want to use Oracle in their cloud platform. They can easily use RightScale’s capabilities to add an Oracle setup to their template. This does not change the fact that a full infrastructure can be launched on the Cloud of their choice with the click of a button and it is offered on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Need one of these setups for staging? Click a button to get an identical environment for staging. Deploy a new application version in staging, test, and if all is well, deploy to an identically configured production environment. Another click of the button and the staging environment goes away until a new one is needed. It’s cost-effective and agile PaaS, without compromising architectural and operational excellence. Exactly what businesses need when running critical applications in the Cloud.

At Zend we are very excited about Cloud Computing. We believe it is a game changer and by delivering an elastic, customizable PaaS built with architectural excellence and multi-cloud in mind, we are able to help our customers get the maximum benefit out of Cloud whether public or private.

The RightScale and Zend joint offering is production-ready, generally available and can be purchased on a pay-as-you-go basis from both RightScale and Zend.

And this is just the beginning. We are working on several additions to the platform including robust application deployment (not far off) and other initiatives that will continue to accelerate onboarding and ensure operational excellence in production.

Thanks to our friends at RightScale who’ve done a phenomenal job in working with us to integrate and harden the platform. It’s been a pleasure!

Happy PHP’ing!

Rapidly deliver native, connected mobile applications with Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 04:28:00 +0000

By 2013, the number of internet-connected mobile devices will exceed the number of internet-connected PCs. Apple’s App Store has paid out more than $2 billion to date to developers of mobile applications, and this is just the beginning. Mobility is the biggest disruption in the industry today and people everywhere are working, playing and learning differently thanks to mobile technologies. Whether at work or on personal time, people have high expectations for a rich and productive mobile user experience. In a recent survey of our Zend Server customers, more than 70% of respondents reported they are either delivering or planning to deliver rich mobile experiences to their users. The need to move quickly and support ever more mobile platforms creates a perfect storm for the emergence of what Gartner calls client-cloud applications*. The client represents a rich application on an internet-connected device while cloud is a set of consumed services hosted in an elastic, scalable cloud platform.

It’s only natural that developers are hungry for a flexible, productive platform that will help them deliver native, connected mobile experiences rapidly. With this in mind, at Zend we have been working closely with our partner Adobe and thanks to that collaboration we are today jointly announcing Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP (Zend Site, Adobe Site).

This new product appeals to developers who want to build creative and capable mobile apps quickly and efficiently. Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP merges the workflows of mobile client and PHP-driven cloud services, and among other things, enables its users to:

Build apps that run natively across multiple platforms and devices including iOS, Android, and Blackberry

Seamlessly create mobile projects that leverage the Flash Platform and PHP

Leverage wizard-driven workflow to easily wire client-side Flex and server-side PHP

Enhance the developer experience, with multi-device integrated debugging across desktop (IDE), mobile device (client app) and server (PHP) — it’s a game-changer

And in case you didn’t quite notice my previous mention of iOS – yes! Adobe will enable standalone applications built with Flex on the iPhone and iPad**, and with that enable our joint customers to target a broad set of mobile devices.

I am very excited re: the possibilities this integration opens up. For a better idea of what this looks like Kevin Schroeder from Zend has created a very cool flash demo.

As I previously noted I believe mobile is going to be one of the biggest game changers, our customers clearly recognize that and we intend to be there to make them successful. PHP is ideally positioned to deliver the services to native, connected applications due to its high-productivity and proven scalability which enables the rapid delivery of optimal user experiences.

A big thank you to the Adobe team – we have made friendships through this partnership and appreciate the investment they are making in PHP. With our friends at Adobe and our ongoing development of the Zend PHP Cloud Platform, we are providing our users with the tools and development experience they need to master internet-connected mobile application development and seize the opportunities created by the mobile revolution.

The Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP bits will ship within 30 days. Register on Zend’s or Adobe’s Web site if you want us to let you know when you can download the bits.

Enjoy!

---

* Gartner, March 2011 - Client-Cloud Applications: The Rebirth of Client/Server Architecture

** Adobe compiles ActionScript down to native ARM code. Once it's compiled and packaged, there's no interpreter and the resulting app is fully compliant with Apple's App Store guidelines. iOS support in Flash Builder 4.5 will ship 30 days after the product is released and will be a free update.

Why I’m (truly and geekishly) excited about Zend Server 5!

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:33:00 +0000

Over the years I’ve played key roles in many software projects. Although I have had many successes there are only a few which were truly memorable. On average I probably do a very exciting project every three years. I would say that’s above industry standards :)

Last week we released Zend Server 5 and it is another memorable moment for me. Not because the process of getting it out the door was all smooth (it sometimes felt like pulling teeth) or because it’s a new major version of Zend Server.

It’s because the new code tracing feature gets me very excited and is a kickass technology. Code tracing solves real problems for developers and IT operation teams. One of the biggest challenges in managing production environments is troubleshooting problems. Whether it is an application that runs transactions against a database, calls Web Services, or interoperates with a Java app server, being able to reproduce the problem after the fact is very often hard and sometimes just impossible. Working on such problems has always killed my productivity and reduced the amount of time I could truly be focused on writing new code.

This is where code tracing comes in. It’s a very cool technology that is optimized to run in production and can keep track of what’s happening deep within the PHP application. It hooks into our event system that tracks DB events, slow scripts, errors, and more. When something goes wrong it can dump a snapshot of the whole execution flow – function calls, arguments, return values, memory consumed, duration – from the beginning of the request to the point where the error occurs. This enables developers to analyze and triage the problem after the fact – easily and efficiently. Best of all – while it’s targeted at production (high performance and robust) it’s also extremely useful during development and testing.

What makes this feature even cooler is that Adobe worked closely with us to build a really nice Flex UI (http://static.zend.com/topics/Zend-Server-code-trace.png) for analyzing code tracing. It feels good to have stable and efficient production technology, but it’s even better when there’s visualization that enables the users to interact with the data quickly and effectively. Thanks to Adobe for helping us build a superb UI! This is just the first version of the UI – the sky’s definitely the limit with where this can go.

I am proud of what we’ve built and the people who participated in building it. I have no doubt that it will lead to tremendous time savings for PHP shops and make developers’ lives significantly easier and happier. I just hope I don’t need to wait another three years now for the next big thing… I bet not!

Oracle and Zend deliver Zend Server via Oracle Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN)

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:31:00 +0000

Oracle and Zend first announced a partnership in 2005. As part of that partnership we worked on enhancing PHP connectivity to Oracle DB, drove innovation based on customer feedback incl. Oracle’s Database Resident Connection Pooling (DRCP) and delivered an out-of-the-box experience for Oracle customers using Zend’s Web stack.

Zend Server was released 6 months ago as a high-performance, reliable and secure PHP stack. Zend Server delivers an out-of-the-box experience with Oracle DB and supports Linux via native rpm repositories. As a result IT shops can provision and manage Zend Server in exactly the same way they manage Linux.

With today’s announcement we are taking our collaboration with Oracle one step further and are making Zend Server available via Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux Network. There are many reasons why this collaboration is good for our mutual users incl.:

- Oracle Enterprise Linux is freely downloadable and redistributable which means that anyone can easily build a full stack with these technologies and distribute them.

- As Linux vendors typically offer long term support they rarely update their PHP versions. While this approach works (and is typically preferable) for the OS layer it doesn’t really suit the app dev level. With this collaboration we deliver complete Enterprise-grade PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 stacks to Oracle users.

- Oracle has very reasonable pricing and a huge, global support organization to deliver on 24/7 support subscriptions.

- It enables us to deliver Enterprise-ready stacks from top to bottom targeting appliances incl. virtualized and cloud environments (and bare metal).

Wim Coekaerts’, Oracle’s VP of Linux and Virtualization Engineering, has also written about this announcement.

With the rollout of the OEL+Zend Server combo we are looking forward to supporting users on a best in breed LAMP stack.

Andi

MySQL can be great for Oracle…

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:26:00 +0000

Since the Sun acquisition was announced I continue to get questions on how it will impact MySQL. This seems to be mainly as a result of the close affinity between PHP and MySQL. I must admit that while I had a lot of immediate thoughts when the IBM/Sun rumor was floating around, I have had a bit of a harder time figuring out what the Oracle/Sun acquisition means for the various pieces of Sun's business including MySQL.

Like many I believe that Oracle would not want to kill MySQL and that steering it more towards the SQL Server market as opposed to Oracle DB could make a lot of sense for Oracle. After all, MySQL definitely competes with SQL Server on ease-of-use and some of the mainstream relational DB features, while for the very high-end features, Oracle is still way ahead (Real Application Clusters, Database Resident Connection Pooling, Backup & Recovery, Data Mining, OLAP). But what will it take to steer MySQL towards SQL Server? Invest in better Windows packaging? Improve performance on Windows? Invest in native management UIs? Build a strong Visual Studio plug-in for MySQL? Make .NET-based applications like Dotnetnuke work better with MySQL? I think it means all of the above and probably some additions I didn’t think of. All that said, I have now changed my mind and believe this is not where the big opportunity lies for Oracle although I see it as a strong secondary strategy and believe Oracle is likely to benefit from executing in this direction regardless.

The other assumption I heard from many was that MySQL would be the entry version for Oracle into accounts. But how would that work in real life? Would they over time build Oracle API (OCI) compatibility into MySQL and hope that at some point people will install Oracle, migrate their data from MySQL to Oracle, and rewrite their applications to access Oracle instead of MySQL? This does make some good sense for Oracle especially as it’d give them a chance to build mindshare and awareness among developers for the their brand. However, brand awareness and account foot print is not enough and I believe this simplistic view does not take into account the user experience. For the user there would be too many challenges in having to swap out the database with a new one, do the data migration and port the application from MySQL to Oracle APIs. In fact, it could be such a pain that users would likely prefer to invest time in working around the MySQL limitations at the application layer instead of doing a migration especially if they are in a time sensitive situation (which MySQL users have been doing successfully for years).

A few days ago I finally figured out what I would do if I were Oracle. I would go out and build an Oracle storage engine for MySQL similar to the DB2 for i storage engine MySQL developed with IBM.(http://solutions.mysql.com/engines/ibm_db2_storage_engine.html) Just think of it as using MySQL as a front-end to Oracle and immediately leveraging the eco-system of developers, applications and tools that support MySQL (see Diagram 1 below). I would then continue to push MySQL’s adoption as much as possible and build out the features that will continue to drive broad adoption.

At this point MySQL would tie directly into Oracle and immediately when a customer needs an Enterprise-grade features like clustering, hot-backup, BI, etc. they could just sell their “Oracle DB Infrastructure” which would support MySQL via the Oracle storage engine. The result would be that without changing any application code you would immediately tie into Oracle and then start leveraging some of Oracle’s unique capabilities.

Of course once that happens, Oracle sells another Oracle license, the data sits in Oracle (typically that means it never migrates anywhere else) and over time other applications will likely leverage this data either via the MySQL interface or directly via OCI (Oracle Client Interface).

What is there left to do for Oracle? No need to focus on investing in Enterprise-grade features for MySQL. They just need to make sure that there’s a good Oracle storage engine which enables a click of a button upgrade from MySQL(InnoDB) to MySQL(Oracle). Seamless to the application and the developer. You get the best of both worlds.

This also makes the CIO extremely happy. They would now have the ability to keep business-critical and sensitive data in Oracle while keeping the developers in their organization happy by letting them use MySQL as the front-end.

I believe by making the right investments in MySQL, Oracle can not only grow the MySQL business but also the Oracle DB business. And if played right it may actually enable Oracle to be less aggressive on the business side with the MySQL products which could also make MySQL's customers and community happier.

Disclaimer: I have no bias towards any of these databases and am only stating what I'd do if I were Oracle. In PHP we have great MySQL , Oracle and SQL Server support. We are the corporate Web glue and will always make it easy for our users to leverage their data sources no matter what they are…

Q&A:

What about the additional latency to drive transactions to another database?

While this would likely add some additional overhead to a simple throughput benchmark I believe in real-world scalability scenarios some of Oracle's solutions like RAC, TimesTen in-memory DB, connection pooling, etc. would potentially address some common objections. But then again I am not a DB engineer so I may be completely wrong.

And what happens with Falcon?

Now Oracle owns MySQL and InnoDB there's no need for it anymore.

And what about the Open Database Alliance (http://opendatabasealliance.com/)?

That may be some nuisance for Oracle but as it would be "open" the Oracle storage engine could work with that too and as stated previously such a strategy may actually enable Oracle to be more community focused than Sun and MySQL AB.

Diagram 1:

Adobe looking for developers to join early access program for Flex Builder

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 04:06:00 +0000

Guest post from my friends at Adobe:

Adobe is currently building the next generation of Flex Builder, the Eclipse based IDE for creating cross-platform rich Internet applications. In this upcoming version, a significant new set of features are being introduced to accelerate creation of data-centric applications with PHP on the server-side leveraging Zend Framework and Zend AMF. Prior to the public Beta later in the year, Adobe would like to invite a select group of PHP developers into a private pre-release program for Flex Builder. You'll get to work with the new data-centric development features, interact with members of the product team, provide feedback, and generally help shape the future of the product. No prior experience with Flex is necessary; in fact feedback from new users would be particularly helpful. There is a brief survey here - please complete it and Adobe will send an invitation to you shortly.

Inside Zend Server: Linux Take 2 - Examples

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 04:59:00 +0000

In my previous Zend Server post I mentioned how cool the native integration into Linux was. Let's be real. How many vendors do you know who go out of their way to not deliver a custom installer or monolithic rpm/deb package but actually build native rpm/deb repositories for the various distros? Call us crazy but our goal was to make this the best possible, most integrated experience for our users and we were willing to work very hard for that.

Below are some screenshots of a Fedora update process which shows the tight integration (click on picture for reasonable quality).

1) Open update manager:

2) Show available updates:

3) Review the updates:

4) Apply the updates:

5) Completed:

Slick! Just like you're used to from your distribution.

Oh and here's a screenshot of Synaptic for the Debian users:

Enjoy!

Inside Zend Server: Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 06:54:00 +0000

In my previous “Inside Zend Server” post I wrote about Zend Server’s significant differentiation on the Windows platform. Although Windows is the most popular development platform for PHP it has by far less footprint in production compared to Linux.

The majority of our customers run PHP on Linux - most of them on Redhat variants. Therefore, it was critical for us to deliver the best possible experience for Zend Server on Linux. In order to show our commitment to Linux we made a strategic decision and decided to release the product in the de-facto, native format for Linux installations so that Zend Server fits into the Linux distributions like a glove.

The advantages that led to this decision were many, to name just a few:

- Using the native installation method means users can install Zend Server just as they would any other software from the distribution's repository. This allows users to utilize the tools they are accustomed to, be it yum, aptitude, synaptic or Kpackage; any tool that supports the DEB or RPM formats will work for the purpose of installing Zend Server.

- Any automation tools used for RPM or DEB installation purposes will work equally well, thus saving the user manual labor and integrating into company’s deployment infrastructures. This also includes making it easy to integrate into solutions like Virtuozzo (we have worked on creating Virtuozzo Templates for Zend Server).

- PHP and Zend Server require many third party libraries in order to work properly. Thanks to the RPM and DEB package managers we are able to leverage an easy way to declare dependencies and use packages officially tested by the distribution as opposed to bundling them. This means Zend Server works consistently with the operating system’s libraries and also benefits from security fixes the distros send out for these 3^rd parties.

- Last but not least, the ability to receive Zend hot fixes via the standard OS mechanism means that updates are easier to detect, to manage, to log and to install.

Zend Server on Linux also includes support for PEAR and PECL (and phpize). For example, installing the PEAR package phpDocumentor is as easy as doing /usr/local/zend/bin/pear install PhpDocumentor. Support for PECL enables you to automatically download and build PHP extensions, e.g. you can install ncurses by just running /usr/local/zend/bin/pecl install ncurses. Sweet!

Another feature which is unique to Zend Server on Linux (commercial version only) is Zend Download Server (ZDS). ZDS is capable of offloading the process of sending large files from Apache, freeing it to handle the more complicated PHP-based requests. While one can accomplish similar results with lighttpd and X-Sendfile: the big advantage of ZDS is that it plugs right into multi-process Apache. It is able to take over serving certain file types automatically and serve specific files via a PHP API extremely efficiently and at the same time free up Apache to serve PHP requests. For sites which serve large files this can deliver a significantly more scalable setup and enables the user to better utilize system resources. All of this under the most common setup – multi-process Apache.

Besides that there are just lots of little things we did to make sure this is the best Linux experience; we do significant performance and stress tests on various Linux distributions, we offer a tar download for the Community Edition, we have Linux optimized watchdogs for our daemons, Optimizer+ our acceleration component has been optimized on Linux, and a lot more...

I have no doubt that Linux users will find Zend Server a very refreshing experience. I can assure you that there are very few commercial solutions which have this level of integration with Linux distributions.

Inside Zend Server: Windows

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:10:00 +0000

Inside Zend Server is a series of blog posts which I intend to write on Zend Server (time permitted). As I pointed out in my previous post on Zend Server there are a lot of different constituencies that Zend Server applies to. In this post I will focus on developers and system administrators who are using Windows either for developing or running PHP–based Web applications.

Running high-performance and stable PHP on Windows has always been a serious challenge. So much of a challenge that in 2004 we announced a Zend product called “Zend WinEnabler” which had the sole purpose of delivering stable PHP on Windows. As part of building that product we built a FastCGI plug-in for IIS and Apache, ported our byte-code cache to Windows, and invested considerably into delivering a good experience on Windows. The product was later on streamlined into the Zend Core and Zend Platform offering on Windows. While the stability and performance of these product lines was exponentially better than anything that had existed on Windows before there was still a considerable gap compared to other OSes.

In 2006, Microsoft and Zend announced a technical collaboration to improve the experience of PHP on Windows. As part of this collaboration some of the main accomplishments included Microsoft’s team delivering a FastCGI component for IIS, we worked on performance enhancements to PHP itself, and made additional investments in making sure PHP is a first-class citizen on Windows incl. Microsoft delivering the SQL Server for PHP extension.

Not only have we leveraged all this work in Zend Server but we have put a very big emphasis on making sure it is absolutely the best PHP production environment for Windows.

Also to be clear, the Zend Server Community Edition is not only meant to be useful to developers but also for production. For example, if you want to run a departmental Wiki in production and you don’t care about critical bug and security hot fixes, monitoring, page caching, support, etc. you are still getting production quality bits, native IIS support, a very fast byte-code cache (which we now for the first time include for free) and lots more. Bottom line, you will get performance on Windows better than anything you’ve ever run also with Zend Server Community Edition and not only with Zend Server.

Some of the main Windows-specific benefits you will experience with Zend Server:

- Native MSI installation following Microsoft best practices (constantly reviewed with the MS certification tool). In addition our MSI supports unattended installation for easy mass deployment.

- Native MSI-based hot fixes. This means unlike Zend Core which was using our homegrown update mechanism you will see applied fixes in “Add or Remove Programs” and for regular hot fixes you will be able to use the standard Windows rollback mechanism.

- Automatically enable and configure the Microsoft FastCGI extension on XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008.

- For Apache users install and enable Zend’s FastCGI extension for best performance and reliability.

- Install SQL Server for PHP extension for out-of-the-box connectivity. Also support MySQL, Oracle, DB2, SQLite and more right out of the gate without needing to download third party drivers.

- Automatically tweak Windows system settings which we found to improve performance in our performance and stress tests. For example, we found that Windows’ MaxUserPort registry entry needed increasing when we ran MySQL benchmarks under stress.

- We test a huge matrix including IIS and Apache on XP, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008 in their various OS editions (why does MS have to have so many editions for each OS?).

In short, you will not find another solution with the performance, reliability and native integration to Windows as Zend Server. Zend Server CE and Zend Server both enjoy the same foundation which enables this first-class support and also both versions have been subject to a large amount of performance and stress testing. If you were using Zend Core in conjunction with Zend Platform on Windows you will feel approximately an additional 30% performance boost. If you were using something else then you are likely to realize significantly greater performance improvements. And that is before you tune the environment in more detail. Check out the Zend Server reference manual for more detailed performance tips both for Optimizer+ and specifically for IIS.

Side note: Two bonus tips for anyone running on Windows which aren’t directly related to Zend Server are included at the end of this post.

In any case, if you’re on Windows I have no doubt that you will be impressed by Zend Server. Guaranteed!

If you have any questions, comments or benchmarks you’d like to share please email them to me at myfirstname at zend.com.

Andi

Two bonus tips regarding PHP on Windows:

- If you can avoid running your application from a UNC share and host it on your local drive you will get much better performance.

- If you’re on Server 2008 then there’s something called a UAC File Virtualization Filter Driver which we have seen to significantly slow down file system performance and hence also many PHP applications. Best to look this up and if you’re willing to experiment you can turn it off with the following command “C:\>sc config LUAFV start=disabled” (your mileage may vary and it could cause compatibility issues so make sure to read this article first). I believe an easier way to deal with this is to host your application on another partition (e.g. D:) as I believe by default this filter is not enabled for non-C: drives.

Zend Server is here! (almost)

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:05:00 +0000

As I alluded in my New Year’s post we’ve been very busy working on a new product line which today we are unveiling as Zend Server. Zend Server is not a Zend Core or Zend Platform derivative (although it uses a small number of those components, mostly enhanced) rather it’s a new approach on how we want to develop, distribute, and service our production products.

The product has been built from the ground-up to enable easy provisioning on servers, all components can be updated which will enable better servicing of PHP and product components, we have created a community edition which includes real goodies like the management UI and Optimizer+ to make it a great runtime environment for developers and non-critical apps, and much more… Most important though, we see it as a way to develop the product much closer to our users and already in the 9+ month beta we have had with hundreds of reviewers (thanks!) we were releasing incremental builds to our users and using forums to make sure feedback reaches the engineers quickly and publicly.

In the past years it has become clear to me that what our users expect is a simple, easy to deploy, and fully integrated Web stack. Getting a solid, consistent Web stack with the necessary functionality to ensure reliability, security and consistency is not a trivial task for most. With Zend Server, one of our key goals is to deliver a low-cost enjoyable solution which ensures users of all skill levels are able to run industrial-strength production environments.

Zend Server delivers value to various types of users including:

- Making a Linux system administrator’s life easy via native package repositories and up-to-date PHP

- The best possible Windows stack supporting IIS and Apache and using native MSIs for installation and software updates

- The database pro with out-of-the-box support for MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and others

- A great way to run Zend Framework applications reliably and fast

- We deliver the best PHP development package for MAC OS X (Community Edition only)

- Or just a really convenient all-in-one PHP package with a nice administration UI, good performance and a growing community

Of course it also features lots of value-add which is key to production but can also be useful in development including monitoring and root-cause, online security and critical fixes for PHP, Optimizer+ (our acceleration technology), a Java Bridge, easy to use page caching and more… Our Website shows the difference between the two editions. We also already have a good roadmap for the rest of the year to add more value over time.

While I intend to elaborate on the various use-cases and applicable audiences in future posts there is one I do want to briefly mention now - the native Linux support. We have really built this product from the ground up reusing only few assets we had previously in order to ensure the easiest, most reliable out of the box experience. One of the major investments we made was in native rpm/deb support. Not only do we come as an rpm but our whole product is actually structured as a repository with dependencies on OS components (i.e. real use of rpms which very few vendors actually do). This means that we sit on the OS like a glove, very natively and easy to administer and when we send out a software update we can do it for any component in the product and you receive the software update as you’d expect on Linux, not through a proprietary update mechanism but through your standard OS update console. This of course opens up a lot of additional opportunities for using Zend Server including easier provisioning with hosters, with VMs, appliances and other use-cases where standardized provisioning is critical.

In future blog posts I will elaborate on more of these areas helping users get the most advantage out of Zend Server depending on the constituency that they belong to.

It was also extremely important to us to make sure we made a free community based version available. Not only to make it as easy as possible for developers to get up and running with PHP but also to help us drive quality in our offering. Some of our biggest challenges in the past have not been serving production environments but rather the user-experience delivered with our installation, licensing and management. One of our key goals for community edition is to deliver real incremental value to our users while in return we get a broad base of users who help us ensure Zend Server is a smooth experience.

Check out Zend Server at Zend.com.

Also you can sign up at our new Zend Forums, kick the tires, and let us know what you think either via the forum or you can email me directly, andi @ zend! You can download either version during this beta program.

Zend to ship in IBM i

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:29:00 +0000

Today we announced that IBM will now ship a preloaded image of Zend's Web stack with any OS upgrade and/or new system purchase. The goal is to distribute the Zend PHP-based stack more broadly and deliver an out-of-the-box experience for PHP on IBM i (formerly known as AS/400 and i-series).

The relationship with the IBM i team started in 2005. I was deeply involved in forming the partnership and at the time did a lot of the research to better understand the opportunity. This was the first time I really got to know the IBM i community and very quickly I discovered a passionate community who loved their platform but really needed a Web solution badly. There were several solutions at the time which enabled IBM i customers to Web-enable their applications. However, PHP was of biggest interest to the community for many reasons including:

- PHP enables customers to tap into a huge pool of existing PHP talent (approx. 6 million developers) which was a game changer for them as far as talent was concerned.

- PHP has a large eco-system of existing applications which they could leverage.

- PHP is cross-platform and enables organizations to leverage their talent across platforms, databases and applications.

- PHP is easy to adopt by anyone. RPG developers (IBM i's most popular language) can easily learn PHP. After all it's the Visual Basic of the Web.

- PHP delivers modern functionality including support for Web Services, Ajax, Search, graphics, etc...

- and many more reasons...

it is very satisfying that the work IBM and we started in 2005 has really been so well received by their community. There is huge interest in PHP in the IBM i community and adoption has been impressive especially given it was said to be a conservative community. We have definitely proven that wrong.

I have no doubt that bringing PHP to the platform has been a game changer for the IBM i user base. Thanks to the partnership IBM and Zend will continue driving adoption and support for PHP on this platform. I am very much looking forward to continuing our close collaboration with the team at IBM who had the foresight of really pushing this hard over the past few years and, with that, not only making PHP on the IBM i a reality but a first-class citizen.

Zend Developer Zone 3.0(?)

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:07:00 +0000

While Zend Developer Zone (a.k.a DevZone) perhaps hasn’t gotten as much attention as Zend Framework or the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) project, it’s an essential piece of the three pronged community-focused strategy Zend launched with the PHP Collaboration Project back in 2005.

DevZone takes an important place alongside Zend Framework and our Eclipse-based tooling as an equal partner in collaboration. Open source companies’ tail wind is the community—and the learning and mentoring environment that comes with it. We have always strived to help support the ongoing process of cross pollination among the community which has truly matured the PHP eco-system as a whole. Professional content, leadership, and expertise associated with the very best practices of PHP are the key to what has made PHP a mature Enterprise-ready Web solution.

When I started working on the concept of the DevZone back in 2005 I called it Zend.org. I actually still have the presentations which I used internally to get the necessary buy in. I felt that in order to mature PHP, that building both a professional Web application framework and supporting the de-facto standard Eclipse framework was not enough. We needed to create a platform which enables our users, our partners, our customers and Zend to deliver best practices and methodology to the community. We have been blessed with the many contributions DevZone has received so far both from individuals and industry heavyweights like IBM and Adobe.

We have also been fortunate to have a line of great community advocates for PHP, from Jayson Minard, to Cal Evans, and I’m now excited that Eli White (http://eliw.com/ ) will be joining Zend. The Zend Editor-In-Chief role or “Community Guy” as Eli puts it is a tough role. It is designed for somewhat of a super human who has strong community building skills, editorial skills, deep PHP technical knowledge, broad software knowledge with an ability to bridge out into other communities, strong presentation skills and the list goes on. Surely a hard role to fill. While none of us are super humans I think Eli is really a great fit for this role and has strengths in all of these areas. While Eli’s predecessors have done an excellent job it is always the responsibility of the next generation to take things to the next level. I have no doubt that Eli has the energy and the talent to do that. I personally am looking very much forward to working closely with him because as Eli’s predecessors can attest, the community role and the developer zone are very close to my heart.

Please welcome me in wishing Eli well in his new position! I am sure he’s already busy cooking up some interesting ideas.

Seven Things About Me - Tagged by Marco

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 06:52:00 +0000

I've been tagged by Marco Tabini. This gives me an opportunity to share some things you may not know about me:

1) I was born in Switzerland to a Swiss father and British mother, moved to Israel at the age of 10, started at an Israeli school and within a year I moved to an American school (in Israel) where I graduated with a US high school diploma. As a result I don’t know any language perfectly. English is my best but I still lack a very broad vocabulary.

2) I got a warning letter during my studies at the Technion that if I don’t shape up they’ll kick me out. Working on PHP was just so much more fun. I am one of the only people I know who didn’t even know who most of their lecturers were (until today) as I rarely attended classes. I spent my days sleeping and the nights coding.

3) I am training myself to make the perfect Cappuccino. Although I’ve only been a serious coffee drinker for about three years, making a great cappuccino has become a hobby of mine and I have all the right prosumer equipment to do so.

4) I was on the varsity basketball team in high-school and even flew abroad for some competitions. Although I only play about once a year or two I am still a decent shot when I get the chance (but I lose my breath within a couple of minutes).

5) I envy graphics and Web designers. I have close to no artistic talent but have always wanted to find time to develop this side of me. Unfortunately I haven’t even managed to find the time to learn Photoshop yet alone practicing on the artistic side.

6) I hate shaving. I really hate shaving. When I was in the army I made sure to time the shave just often enough so I could still get away with not shaving every day. Unfortunately these days Eyal, my four year old son, complains when I want to kiss him and I’m not shaved so there’s finally someone who’s motivating me. Wife and Army didn’t do quite as good of a job.

7) I love food and eating out. Typically we start our days off, first thinking where we’re going to eat, and only then what we’re actually going to do. My first two hours of my first time in New York were spent booking restaurants for every day of the following week.

Here are the people I'm tagging:

- Marcus Börger: Smart guy and happens to live in my original hometown of Zürich.

- Mark de Visser: Few know the open-source space better than Mark.

- Roy Ganor: Leads the Zend Studio and PDT team and still not broadly known despite having a lot of interesting thoughts to share. Need to get him aggregated onto planet-php.net :)

- Stas Malyshev: First person to join Zend and someone who's opinion I deeply respect (even if I don't always agree).

- Christopher Jones: Probably the first big vendor employee to get deeply involved with the PHP community.

- Gaylord Aulke: Very talented and experienced Web architect who's led many great projects.

- John Coggeshall: Who I am sure can surprise us all with his factoids.

And here are the rules I'm supposed to pass on to the above bloggers:

* Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 08:42:00 +0000

Looking back at 2008:

This has really been a crazy year. Probably the first year I truly felt I couldn’t keep up with everything that was happening around me (in a good sense). Not because of the depression in the market but rather because many different aspects of our business, community and eco-system have accelerated. Amidst these changes I have also taken on additional roles at Zend to help drive the next phases of our multi-year strategy.

For Zend this has been an important year in delivering on our long term strategy and plan. The PHP Collaboration project which we announced at the end of 2005 has really come to fruition and delivered on its promise including:

- Zend Framework: This year we have had three major releases of Zend Framework, 10 million downloads since inception, two new partners w/ Adobe Systems and Dojo (SitePen) joining as contributors, and many more contributors joining the project. We are very proud that significant content in each release of ZF was not driven by Zend but rather the community. Zend Framework also has driven more opportunity to Zend with both small and large customers unfortunately it is not easy to get the largest ones to agree to being named in public; suffice to say that Enterprise adoption has significantly accelerated. Also we are seeing the next-generation of PHP applications emerging built on Zend Framework including Magento, PHPProjekt and others; some already public and some not, but both driving value to our users and opportunity for Zend and our partners.

- PDT: The 2^nd open-source project we launched with the PHP Collaboration Project is the PHP Development Tools (PDT) open-source project at the Eclipse Foundation. This project also has been a great success for us. It has been consistently ranked in the top 2 most popular projects at the Eclipse Foundation which is not only impressive by itself but especially so as Eclipse has traditionally been more focused at the Java community.

On the commercial product side it has also been exciting. We launched Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.0 in January 2008 which builds on top of PDT and delivers a fully fledged IDE for professional developers on the Eclipse framework. We followed with 6.1 in September adding better support for ZF, Ajax and SQL.

On the application server side we released Zend Platform 3.6 w/ enhanced support for page caching esp. URL-based schemes which is critical for framework based applications, enhanced our support for monitoring and root cause, and delivered a variety of additional enhancements. Our reliable PHP offering, Zend Core, which delivers a fully-supported PHP offering including hot fixes to keep PHP up-to-date with the latest critical issues, also saw several releases including version 2.5. And all this not only in the standard packages on Linux and other OSes but also on the IBM i (AS/400) where we drove additional innovation including a 5250 bridge which enables IBM i shops to modernize and move to the Web extremely quickly while retaining the flexibility of working with a language like PHP.

What’s coming up in 2009?

The economic reality drives opportunity for companies like Zend as our solution and eco-system deliver a low-cost and high-quality alternative to Java and other more expensive solutions. While spending has tightened our experience during the dot-com bust was that ultimately it increased the opportunity for Zend. The world back then shifted from an almost de-facto standard stack of Sun, Weblogic and Oracle to embracing Linux, PHP and MySQL. With the large Java vendors already struggling to resurrect their relevance in the Web application space I believe the current economic climate can only accelerate the market opportunity for us.

2008 was an important year for us. Not only did we finish delivering on the first part of our long-term strategy but spent a good part of the year driving a strong roadmap for 2009. The foundation for this roadmap is to leverage what we have achieved so far and deliver a fully integrated and mature solution for professional PHP shops. Some key goals include:

- Continue contributing to the open-source projects which we use as a basis for our solution including PHP, Zend Framework and PDT and help drive ubiquity in the Web market.

- An increasing emphasis on service and quality. This means more frequent releases, more frequent hot fixes, more opportunity for our users to contribute to the process and a preference to reduce the support matrix to enable more focus on the most common setups.

- Simplicity: We want it to be easy to get up and running with Zend, both on the development and the production side. We are putting a big emphasis on making the whole adoption of our solution easier and more straightforward.

On the application server side we have an exciting roadmap which again leverages the investments we have made thus far. We will be focusing at simplicity, streamlining deployment, performance management and delivering a supported and up-to-date PHP. We have spent the past year working on integrating some of our key goals on the application server side and are looking forward to delivering it to market in 2009. As we will roll out a lot of this work we also continue to have a strong feature roadmap for the year on delivering additional value with at least one very cool innovation cooking in the garage. We are also on the look-out for PHP 5.3 and have already made preparations to pick-up and support this major new version when it goes GA.

On the development tools side we have a strong roadmap for Zend Studio for Eclipse. We will be building this roadmap on PDT 2.0 which the team released two days ago (congrats!). PDT 2.0 brings a new source editing experience to PHP developers with a new robust platform and with many new features. It also has more than 500 issues fixed. We believe the time we are investing in PDT will serve us well when we continue to drive innovation around Zend Studio for Eclipse. We have also announced that we will be joining the Galileo simultaneous release (http://wiki.eclipse.org/Galileo) which will provide better synchronization between the various projects in Eclipse and the PDT project and ultimately will deliver more value to our Zend Studio for Eclipse customers. This also puts PHP in the list of leading top languages that provide “Eclipse Aligned” packages (currently these are Java, Java EE and C++).

Not only does our roadmap hold a lot of opportunity for our partners but we’ve been working throughout the 2^nd half of 2008 to continue driving various partner initiatives. We are fortunate to have strong partnerships from small ISVs and SIs to larger corporations like Adobe, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. We continue to drive joint community contributions, product integrations, customer successes and other initiatives with our partners which will continue to strengthen and roll-out throughout 2009.

If you’ve made it this far I’d like to close by thanking all of our community, customers, partners, and employees for not only making 2008 an enjoyable year but for also supporting us towards rolling out a successful 2009.

Happy New Year!

1o million downloads and counting. . .

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 03:49:00 +0000

That's right. Zend Framework has been downloaded 10 million times. And hopefully I'll be announcing 100 million downloads here soon, since the download rate continues to grow exponentially or almost so :)

When I started the Zend Framework project back in 2005 I was sure that we could make a difference. Some thought it was a long shot with too ambitious goals, after all I wanted to start from scratch without a single line of code, no community contributors and no corporate contributors. We are now 3.5 years later and I have to say Zend Framework's success has exceeded my own foresight and expectations. The download numbers are only a reflection of the success we've seen with Zend Framework; after all we can't really count anymore as we are available via Ubuntu, Fedora, hosting providers, Zend products, etc... And there are only more of these on the way... Yes, by the end of next year it may very well be 100 million but I doubt we will be able to continue counting much longer.

There are lots of people behind the success of ZF. The team at Zend - present and past, our technology partners incl. IBM, Google, Adobe, Microsoft and others, and -last but not least- our large community of contributors and users. I just hope that everyone else is having as much fun with this project as we are.

Although it is not the new year quite yet this is a great way for us to end 2008; and the project is still young having been GA for less than a year and a half!

One closing side note: there will be a new webinar available from the Adobe site on Zend_Amf which will cover the current state of the component and future plans. This is something you won't want to miss if you're interested in building RIA's in PHP.

Happy ZF'ing!

Is it that time already? Zend Framework 1.7 is now available for download!

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:56:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce that the Zend Framework team, together with the ever-growing and always generous Zend Framework community, has delivered Zend Framework 1.7. Just in time for Adobe MAX!

As I’ve mentioned previously, Adobe and Zend have been working together to make Flex and AIR application development much easier for PHP developers. This announcement marks a significant milestone in those efforts with the production release of the Zend_Amf component in ZF 1.7. Now PHP 5 developers can use the open, binary AMF3 protocol (think of it as ActionScript’s native tongue) as easily as any other server-client protocol in Zend Framework. To maximize compatibility, AMF0 is also supported. With the Dojo Toolkit integration introduced in our last release and the new Zend_Amf component, Zend Framework has become an indispensable tool for RIA development in PHP 5.

Zend_Amf is really just the tip of the iceberg; Zend Framework 1.7 is packed with additional features to make PHP applications richer, easier to develop, and faster. Shipped in our new Extras Library, ZendX_JQuery provides integration with the popular JQuery JavaScript toolkit. The Extras Library has itself been introduced to ship components with the same high quality that you’ve come to expect of Zend Framework components in the Standard Library, but that are not eligible for paid Zend support. The ZF team has focused on two areas for its contributions in 1.7: performance enhancements and support for i5/OS. We have identified and improved bottlenecks in Zend_Loader, Zend_Controller, the server components, and Zend_Search_Lucene. In addition, we have added i5 support to our DB2 adapter while running all ZF unit tests in an i5 environment to make Zend Framework the best PHP framework available for i5, hands down.

There are simply too many new features to list. The following are just highlights - see the README.txt for a full list of new features:
• Dojo Toolkit 1.2.1 Support
• Support for dijit editor in Dojo Toolkit as a form element
• Google Book Search API in Zend_Gdata
• Support for indexing Office Open XML documents in Zend_Search_Lucene, including MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel
• Numerous i18n enhancements
• Zend_Config_Writer for writing Zend_Config objects out to any stream

First and foremost, I’d like to thank the Zend Framework community for making this release happen. In particular, I’d like to thank our ZF team (Wil Sinclair, Matthew Weier O’Phinney, Alexander Veremyev, and Ralph Schindler). I also like to thank Wade Arnold, the developer of Zend_Amf, and everyone at Adobe who contributed their time to educate developers on this component

We’ve also had more community contributions in this release than ever before, so thanks to the dedicated souls who made sure their contribution made it in to 1.7. There are a lot of people to thank, so you can be sure that I’ve missed someone. I hope to catch you next release.

One last thing, this release comes almost exactly 2 ½ months after the 1.6 release. Not too shabby!

Oh and one last thing. If you're using another PHP framework or have something homegrown we have also packaged the Zend_Amf component separately for your convenience.

Zend_Amf Update...

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 03:44:00 +0000

At ZendCon this year we announced a partnership between Zend and Adobe. The goal of the partnership is to help make it easier for PHP developers to use Flex. Since then there has been a flurry of activity including blog posts and the introduction of Zend_Amf into the main trunk of Zend Framework.

To help get PHP and Zend Framework developers up and running quickly, Kevin Hoyt has created a set of examples of using the new Zend_Amf component and posted them on his blog, in a post titled Lots of Flash, Flex, and Zend, PHP Samples.

"Depending on how you count it, there are somewhere between 13 and 54 different Flash, and/or Flex examples included in the attached archive - that doesn’t even count the different PHP examples (also included)."

Kevin's examples cover:
- Hello AMF
- Hello Text
- Hello XML
- Inline
- Object
- Remoting
- REST

It's a post that really gives PHP developers a good starting point and some excellent examples to work from. If you are interested in experimenting with Flex and PHP, you really need to read his post and explore his examples.

To be able to use the examples, you will need a version of Zend Framework that includes Zend_Amf.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Software Architect for Zend Framework, recommends checking out the latest version of Zend_Amf from SVN until 1.7 is officially released.

So make sure you grab the latest version from svn or get the final version of Zend Framework 1.7 when it comes out.

For further research on using Adobe Flex and Zend_Amf:
- Lee Brimlow and Matthew Weier O'Phinney's recently presented a webinar titled Using Zend Framework with Flex. (Free registration required)
- RIAFox.com has a manual page for Zend_Amf.
- Wade Arnold, the author of Zend_Amf, has several good blog posts on his blog covering Flex and Zend_AMF.

As usual, although I strongly :) recommend using ZF for all your PHP programming, if you just want AMF support for PHP--consistent with the Zend Framework 'use at will' architecture--you can use Zend_Amf standalone without using other parts of Zend Framework.

Zend and Adobe Partner!

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:48:00 +0000

Today we announced a partnership with Adobe Systems. The goal of the partnership is to make it easier for developers to use Flex with PHP. I am excited about this partnership as it helps deliver a premier RIA technology to our users.

As part of the collaboration we will make sure that our users can successfully plug-in Flex Builder into Zend Studio for Eclipse. This is a good testament for the benefits of the Eclipse eco-system which was one of the main reason we chose it for our next-generation of Zend Studio. Also, as I've already mentioned in a previous post, Adobe has joined the ZF community.

Strengths of Flex include significant productivity gains, WYSIWYG tooling with Flex Builder, good performance, support in Adobe AIR which helps bridge Web applications to the desktop and many more cool features. I really think Adobe has very exciting technology for building RIAs and recommend people familiarize themselves with Flex. You will probably quickly get a good feeling for what use-cases you'd want to use Flex in and when Ajax. In fact, you are even able to use both within the same Web application.

In addition, we will work on publishing more developer oriented content so that we make it easier to get started. We have already started putting some content together which you can find on Adobe's Flex PHP Developer Zone. There are also several articles on Flex, AIR and PHP on the Zend Developer Zone.

If you've already made good use of PHP and Flex and think that your company would make a good case-study please let me know. You can email me at andi@youknowthecompany.com.

Enjoy!

Zend Framework 1.6 Featuring Dojo, SOAP, Testing, and more...

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:36:00 +0000

The Zend Framework Community has delivered another feature-rich release of Zend Framework and I'm extremely proud and happy to see the energy and excitement around this project. The ZF team (Wil Sinclair, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Ralph Schindler, Alexander Veremyev) along with many others in the ZF community and at Zend, have been doing a superb job and have been working very hard to put this release together. I’d also like to extend the team's thanks to Alex Russell, Dylan Schiemann, and Peter Higgins from the Dojo Foundation who supported the collaboration between ZF and Dojo and helped make the integration a reality for the 1.6 release. Such a deep collaboration between a major server-side framework and a market leading client-side Javascript framework is a rarity in the Web community.

The integration with Dojo, which I previously blogged about, has already had a significant impact in community. In the spirit of consuming our own work we have also updated the Zend Framework Web site to use some of the Dojo integration work we have done. Some examples include the enhanced ZF partners page and the FAQ.

In addition, with this release we continue to provide enterprise-grade features with our new Zend_Soap component, which brings PHP-style simplicity to building and exposing SOAP web services. This component can operate in both WSDL and non-WSDL mode and makes creating or consuming a SOAP service a snap.

Also we've made Zend Framework even easier to use for agile and test-driven development. In fact, ZF 1.6 is the first Zend Framework release developed entirely with an agile methodology (based on Scrum). Under Matthew's direction, we've provided a functional testing harness that makes testing your Zend Framework controllers easier than ever before. We do this by providing the necessary mock objects you need to simulate an HTTP request and making it easy to test the response and routing of the request. See Matthew's blog post for more on this essential new component in Zend Framework.

Zend Framework 1.6 marks another major milestone in Zend Framework history. We have had remarkable adoption and are seeing Zend Framework continue to drive PHP adoption not only in the broader Web developer community but also deeper into more conservative organizations. There is definitely a huge change happening in the Web community driven by goals around productivity, engineering methodology and lowering the total cost for releasing and managing Web applications. I’m glad that we are doing our share to enable this wave when economic drivers and the need for rapid and incremental innovation are making IT personnel rethink their traditional methodology and technology choices.

If you still haven't registered for ZendCon 08 then you should get on it. There will be plenty of content around Zend Framework not to mention that several ZF team and community members will be attending. There will therefore surely be plenty of opportunity to discuss ZF, present and future… Hope to see you there!

Enjoy this release!

---

For an (almost) complete list of enhancements in ZF 1.6 please see below:

Preview of Tooling Project:

Zend_Tool is a component currently under development in the Zend Framework library. It provides services for generating and managing ZF-based projects. We are offering a preview release along with ZF 1.6 to collect feedback from users in a variety of environments and with different requirements. Please let us know how Zend_Tool works for you by visiting the Zend_Tool focus group site at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/zf-tool/. We will also be posting an overview of Zend_Tool on the Zend Developer Zone within the next 24 hours.

Lucene 2.3 Index File Format Support:

Starting with 1.6, ZF supports version 2.3 of Lucene's index file format. This update to the format allows segments to share a single set of doc store (vectors & stored fields) files, which enables faster indexing in certain cases. This also makes Zend_Search_Lucene compatible with the latest version of the Lucene project.

Zend_Session save handler for Database Tables:

This is a database independent adapter for use with Zend_Session. Saving sessions in the database may be used for supporting sessions which must be maintained across multiple servers or kept for logging purposes.

Paginator Component:

Zend_Paginator is a new component for displaying large data sets in groups of 'pages' on a website. It can paginate data from virtually any source, and it fetches data lazily to maximize performance and minimize memory use when the data set is particularly large (as is often the case with data stored in a relational database). Zend_Paginator comes with a few data source adapters out of the box, along with an interface for implementing additional data source adapters.

Figlet Support:

Zend_Text_Figlet can create large ascii-character-based text given a figlet font and a string to render. Although they’ve been around for a long time, Figlets are most useful for captchas nowadays, especially when a lightweight solution is required and/or bandwidth is constrained. In fact, the new captcha form element includes an adapter for figlets.

ReCaptcha Service:

ReCaptcha is a very cool service that provides text-based captcha images. The answers submitted to ReCaptcha help digitize printed books. The new captcha form element also includes an adapter for the ReCaptcha service. Read more about ReCaptcha here: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html.

Captcha Form Element:

A form element to render and validate captchas, which are commonly used to ensure a human is submitting a form and not a (potentially malicious) bot. The captcha form element is backed by several adapters for different captcha mechanisms, including GD-based graphics, figlets, and the ReCaptcha service. Users can implement their own adapters;each adapter takes care of validation and decorators to ensure the form element looks and behaves correctly, regardless of the captcha mechanism used.

Zend_Config_Xml Attribute Support:

XML attribute support has been added to Zend_Config_Xml that allows ZF developers to write smaller XML documents that are more human-readable. This attribute support is already seeing a lot of adoption inthe Zend_Tool project.

Zend_File_Transfer Component:

This is a new component used for transferring files from one machine to another over multiple protocols. It currently supports HTTP, with an adapter interface that can be implemented to support additional protocols in the future. This component also supports validation on the transferred file.

File Upload Form Element:

This component completes the HTML form element support in Zend_Form. Files can be chosen by the user, validated for properties such as size, and uploaded to the server simply by adding a file upload form element to your forms. The element utilizes Zend_File_Transfer internally to validate the uploaded file and move it to its final destination.

Zend_Wildfire Component with FireBug Log Writer:

Zend_Wildfire is a new component supporting the Wildfire protocol: http://www.wildfirehq.org/. This feature also adds a FireBug log writer to write server-side log events to a FireBug console. A specialized FireBug Zend_Db profiler is provided to log DB profiler data to the FireBug console, as well.

Media View Helpers (Flash, QuickTime, Object, and Page):

ZF 1.6 contains new view helpers for embedding Flash, QuickTime, Objects, and Pages in a view.

Zend_Translate adds the INI file format:

This addition adds to the long list of translation file formats it already supports.

ZendCon 2008 Is Around The Corner

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:02:00 +0000

I can't believe it's already ZendCon time again! I've been meeting with the planning committee and I'm really excited about this year's conference. All the usual things are back to make it great: we have a great lineup of speakers, the Meet the Teams session, and special guests like noted PHP security expert Stefan Esser, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith of ajaxian.com, and Alex Russell from Dojo. When you add those names to the usual group of PHP experts and community members we always have at ZendCon, you can understand the excitement.

We are also continuing the tradition of hosting the ZendCon UnCon. This gives any attendee of ZendCon the chance to share their interest in PHP topics outside of the scheduled sessions. I encourage everyone registered for the conference to visit the UnCon wiki, review the sessions posted there and then post your own.

This year's wiki is up and if you are attending, you need to take a look at it to see what is going on, what groups will be there and get an early look at the UnCon schedule. Make sure you add your name to the growing attendee list. We have a twitter account, @zendcon that you can follow for last minute updates and special offers.

Speaking of Social Media, if you are talking about ZendCon, we want to know.

Make sure you tag your blog posts, tweets, photos and other social media conversations with zendcon08. This way we can track everything and share it with others.

If you haven't registered for ZendCon 08 yet then you need to hurry. Advance registrants get special pricing.

Finally, I want to say thank you to the PHP community and our great list of sponsors including Adobe, IBM, Microsoft and many others. Their participation will ensure that this year's conference will be great.

See you soon at ZendCon!

Adobe to contribute AMF support to Zend Framework

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:28:00 +0000

Adobe has made a proposal for an AMF (Action Message Format) component in Zend Framework. This ZF component will allow for client-side applications built with Flex and Adobe AIR to communicate easily and efficiently with PHP on the server-side. Leading the design of the component for Adobe is Wade Arnold. Wade already has a track record of bringing the Adobe RIA technologies to PHP as a result of all of his work on AMFPHP.

We are excited about this proposal as it is consistent with our emphasis to be a heterogeneous “use-at-will” framework and as it substantially strengthens Zend Framework’s RIA story. It is also another industry heavyweight joining as an official ZF contributor and joining the likes of IBM, Google and Microsoft in doing so.

Now that we have the Dojo integration ready for ZF 1.6 as a great Ajax story, AMF will complement that with more of an Enterprise oriented solution. We are currently planning to have AMF support aligned with the ZF 1.7 release but we will know better once the proposal has made it through the proposal process. Adobe’s software has some significant strengths including WYSIWYG tooling with their Flex Builder product, multimedia support and a way to bridge Web technologies to the desktop with Adobe AIR. With this integration Zend Framework users will enjoy the best of both worlds: Dojo as a broadly adopted open-standards Ajax solution supported by literally all popular browsers and operating systems and Adobe’s RIA solutions which are the most ubiquitous commercially driven RIA technologies. And best of all, Dojo and Adobe have actually worked together to make sure that Dojo runs well in Adobe AIR (http://dojotoolkit.org/air) so we see these technologies can also work nicely together.

Adobe, welcome to the Zend Framework family… We are glad to have you on board.

ZF Well Represented at SourceForge Awards

noreply@blogger.com (Andi Gutmans) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:44:00 +0000

SourceForge will be presenting its community choice awards at OSCON again this year. The Zend Framework team will be watching closely, since no fewer than two (!) new ZF-based projects have made it in to the finals: Magento and Tine 2.0.

Magento has been taking the eCommerce software world by storm. We’ve been hearing a lot about Magento as a well-designed and well-executed software product, but you’ve got to hand it to the Magento team for awesome community-focused resources like Magento Connect. I can only assume they built this stuff with all the development time ZF saved them. ;) Magento is a finalist in the following categories: Best Project for the Enterprise, Best New Project, Most Likely to Change the World & Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition. Make sure you put in your vote here. Congrats, guys!

Tine 2.0 is another big enterprise-oriented project, but focused on the intranet and collaboration. It’s also a full rewrite of the popular eGroupWare project using Zend Framework to improve maintainability and stability, among other things. Tine 2.0 is a finalist in the Best New Project category. Way to go!

One of our goals in building ZF was to provide a solid foundation upon which other project teams could build great software. I think Magento and Tine 2.0 are proof that we’ve had some impact here. It’s particularly nice to see the warm reception of ZF as a foundation for PHP best practices in the OS community. Who knows? Maybe next year you’ll be able to vote for ZF itself.

Good luck to both projects!

[Thanks to Wil Sinclair for contributing content for this post]