Zend Technologies has made it affordable for even the youngest novice to start developing in PHP with an introductory discount on its bundled Zend Studio Professional and the newly released Zend Studio for Eclipse. The package was released recently along with version 3.6 of Zend Platform PHP Web application server.

Zend Platform 3.6 significantly expands the breadth and depth of its manageability, performance, and clustering support for PHP, enabling organizations to better guarantee that their business-critical Web applications will meet end user's quality, availability, and response time expectations. Zend Studio for Eclipse includes a comprehensive set of editing, debugging, analysis, optimization, and database tools, as well as support for agile development processes such as unit testing, refactoring, code coverage, and profiling.

Zend Platform

"The overall responsiveness and reliability of PHP web applications is determined by a wide range of factors. PHP developers and Web administrators often struggle with a patchwork of technologies to identify and remove bottlenecks and causes of failure," said Mark de Visser, chief marketing officer at Zend Technologies. "Zend Platform 3.6 offers a comprehensive solution to this problem. At every stage of the application lifecycle it helps developers and administrators understand and improve the quality, performance, and reliability of their PHP applications."

Zend Platform 3.6 delivers new and enhanced functionality in 3 major areas:

·        PHP Intelligence. Zend Platform monitors PHP applications in real time and reports script errors, database problems, performance issues and more. It reduces downtime by recording full context for reported problems for easy "root cause" diagnostics and short time to resolution. The enhancements in version 3.6 include the ability to monitor HTTP, Apache and Java events, expanded performance alerts, and better diagnostics by enabling debugging of production problems on development servers.

·        Performance Management. Zend Platform improves the performance of PHP applications by caching pre-optimized PHP byte code and content in a number of ways. In version 3.6, the options for caching content have been expanded substantially, with support for file or URL based page caching, client-side caching and in-memory or disk based data caching. In addition to the powerful caching functionality, Zend Platform 3.6 also offers automatic output compression to save bandwidth, enhanced job-queues for deferred and offline processing and an improved download server for optimized delivery of large content and media files.

·        Cluster Management. Zend Platform provides support to scale PHP applications across clusters of servers, thereby improving application reliability and overall performance. Improved in Platform 3.6 are the high-availability options and the cluster configuration and support tools.

Early Adopter

Ticket booking agent InTicketing offers event organizers online ticketing and box office services, selling more than one million tickets per year. "Our business is characterized by very strong peaks of activity, so our Web applications need to be able to perform well under very high transaction volumes," said Marc Urbaitel, co-founder and CTO at InTicketing. "During our recent start of sales of tickets for the 'Burning Man' event we processed more that 20,000 job processes in the first few hours of ticket sales. We deployed an early version of Zend Platform 3.6 on load balanced Web servers with a dedicated job queue server, which enabled us to process these transactions while maintaining very good response times on our Web site."

"Zend Framework applications are generally built using a model-view-controller design pattern (MVC) that enables a separation of business logic and data from the visual user interface elements. The new URL-based page caching of Platform 3.6 will dramatically improve the performance of these MVC applications," says Andi Gutmans, co-founder and co-CTO at Zend Technologies. "With over three million downloads to date, and many corporate deployments of Zend Framework, we are excited to be able to offer our customers this important new functionality."

Zend Studio for Eclipse

Zend has recently announced it has completed beta testing and has released for general availability Zend Studio for Eclipse, an integrated development environment (IDE) for PHP built on top of the Eclipse PDT project. Zend Studio for Eclipse is designed for professional PHP developers who need to support the entire PHP application lifecycle and want to take advantage of the sophistication and extensibility of the Eclipse framework and ecosystem, the company said.

For a limited time, Zend is offering developers a 25 percent discount off the normal $399 price of Zend Studio for Eclipse to get them to try the new toolset. Purchasers get licenses for both the stand-alone Zend Studio Professional and the new Eclipse-based product. The bundled products come with perpetual lifetime licenses that include a one-year subscription to support and upgrades. For a limited time, Zend is offering both products for $299. Visit Zend Store for details.

Zend Studio for Eclipse improves the quality of PHP applications, speeds development cycles, and simplifies complex projects, according to the company. It includes a comprehensive set of editing, debugging, analysis, optimization and database tools, as well as support for agile development processes such as unit testing, refactoring, code coverage and profiling. Eclipse provides first class multi-language support, has an extensible architecture and is supported by a vibrant open source community. Further features include Zend Framework integration, HTML WYSIWYG editor, Subversion support and more.

"More than 15,000 developers participated in the beta program for Zend Studio for Eclipse, which makes it by far the largest beta-test effort we have ever conducted for a commercial product," said Andi Gutmans, co-CTO and co-founder of Zend Technologies and Eclipse board member. "The feedback has been very positive, especially from commercial users who in many cases had already standardized on Eclipse as their development environment. It validates our strategy to move our PHP IDE to the open source Eclipse platform."

Dallas-based Stream Energy, electricity provider to roughly 300,000 customers in Texas, is one client who truly appreciates the versatility the Zend product offers. "Zend Studio for Eclipse allows all our developers to work in similar environments, whether they're working with PHP, Flex, Java, or almost anything else," said Jason Forgey, Stream Energy's director of information technology. "The included PHPUnit support and integration with features from Zend Framework are invaluable. The ability to integrate in other Eclipse plugins like Mylyn, SoapUI, and Subversive allow us to access all our day-to-day tools from the same IDE."

"With more than 250,000 downloads since its launch in September 2007, the Eclipse PDT project has had a very successful start. The introduction of Zend's commercial IDE on top of PDT further strengthens the project," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "The Eclipse Foundation is excited to see this collaboration by the Eclipse and PHP communities rapidly gain momentum."

"As the traction from the PDT project indicates, interest from the Eclipse community in PHP is strong," said Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst at RedMonk. "With the release of Studio, Zend has the opportunity to bring the sizable Eclipse and PHP communities together by combining the best of both worlds."

About Zend

Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP Company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications. PHP is used by more than 20 million Web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic Web applications. Deployed at more than 15,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Zend is headquartered in Cupertino, Calif. For more information, please visit http://www.zend.com/, or call 1-408-253-8800.