Zend targets Java with growing PHP community

Leave it to Zend to kick Java-loving Sun Microsystems when it's down.

PHP has become one of the hottest programming languages in technology, and the engine behind the little scripting language that could is Zend Technologies. Back in 2000 Zend released its Zend Framework to facilitate PHP development, and it's now taking this Java-bashing crusade a step further with the release of its new Zend Server, as The Register reports.

As Dave Rosenberg notes over on CNET's Software Interrupted blog, Zend Technologies is making available its Zend Server on Tuesday as both a commercial product and one free to the community for download. Why? Because such a move should further facilitate PHP adoption and give Zend a prime location to profit from that adoption.

Smart strategy. The new Zend Server can be easily integrated into any bundle, runs native to the operating system, and offers significant performance and management features. With the community version, the company says developers and admins can set up a complete PHP environment in minutes.

This is especially interesting for two reasons:

1. With the general availability of Zend Server, the company is obviously signaling that it's serious about run-time and extending its products beyond tools. In other words, it wants to make money. Lots of it. It's smart enough to know that there is a huge market opportunity to support PHP application development with a full production environment--from tools to run-time. And with both the company and a community of users supporting it, Zend can help PHP dominate in Web development.
2. The company is going to use the freeware model to accelerate adoption and then convert some of those users to paying customers and provide a foundation of access and support for which the open-source software model has blazed the trail. This model has worked for Red Hat, Zimbra, and others, and I suspect it will work for Zend, too.

This wraps up a really amazing decade for Zend Technologies and its recently appointed CEO, Andi Gutmans. And with big companies like Adobe Systems, Google, IBM and Microsoft using PHP or rumored to nearing full support for it, the next decade should be equally as productive.

In other words, life just became a wee bit harder for Sun. Just what it needed.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

[evanchooly]

This is interesting and all but I think the "threat" or "problem" for Sun is stretching things a bit far. PHP? Really?

[ciuranae]

Matt,

I agree with your overall assessment. PHP is not the prettiest language, nor is Zend a silver bullet, but there are enough large, busy sites built on PHP that demonstrate its power.

I believe that the biggest concern for development managers and anyone starting a project in PHP is the ease with which the language lets someone slip into bad habits. PHP is very much caveat programmer. If developers lack discipline to maintain separation of concerns and to put the effort into writing maintainable code, PHP code becomes the biggest sand trap and time drain in the organization.

Most PHP developers work with a LAMP mentality with a two-tier architecture (in many cases, a single tier). PHP applications then become notoriously not scalable because database access, services, etc. end up being married to a single server. This isn't a problem when the application has only a few hundred users, but a massive explosion in popularity creates huge scalability problems.

Zend helps increase performance and scale applications vertically, but it still remains to be seen as a good tool for horizontal scalability. I have good wishes to Zend, and use PHP occasionally, so I look forward to seeing a strong alternative to Java, especially with all the run-run of mergers and acquisitions.

Cheers!

pr3d4t0r
http://eugeneciurana.com/paster.vim

[royrusso]

The truth is that both PHP and Java have their place within an IT organization.

The funny thing is that stories about the demise and disruption of Java still get published.

[saltylaker]

I think spinning PHP as a threat to Sun Microsystems is a bit out of touch. Their flagship and Open Source IDE (NetBeans 6.5) supports PHP coding. Much of the Object-oriented syntax for PHP 5.0 came from working with the Java community. PHP is a cross platform language in contrast to Microsoft's ASP. Sun has been quite friendly to all languages that don't lock you into to a particular platform (namely Windows). Zend has even been rumored as a possible take-over target of Sun Microsystems.

[pentest]

Java rules the enterprise and for good reason. Python and Ruby are superior web languages, and have the ability to be used on the desktop, in administration and many other places where PHP fails.

PHP is a hideous language that is a security nightmare. Hopefully it is on its way down.