Zend and the art of PHP
Published: 10 May 2002 16:17 BST
Zend provides products for use in an enterprise development environment, and its founders are the creators of PHP itself. This article will discuss the validity of using PHP in enterprise endeavors and examine recent developments within this community.
Resource appeal
PHP does one thing, and does it well: Web applications. While all server-side Web platforms offer roughly the same features, PHP has the added bonus of being geared toward the people who will actually write the code. Its syntax is simple, intuitive yet powerful, and easy to adopt whether you're new to development or have been programming for years.
Other easy-to-use languages focus on a developer base that is specific to their platform, but PHP is structured to be familiar to those who have been working with C, C++, Java, Perl, and the like. It offers companies a much larger resource pool from which to find talented individuals who will be immediately productive.
Another great benefit of PHP is that it is open source. Why is that so great? Not only is there no licensing fee required to use it, but you've also got immediate, free access to thousands of applications, dozens of extension modules, standardized code libraries, and a huge support group.
These add-ons have been developed by programmers willing to share their experience and who, for the most part, write to standards, comment their code, and structure their scripts so that they're easy to read, modify, and deploy. Given the crunch deadlines experienced at most companies performing custom development, this is a tremendous time-saver and helps ensure reusability of your code. For these reasons and more, PHP's growing popularity with corporate clients comes as no surprise.
Corporate adoption
As with Perl, PHP started being used in enterprise solutions as the result of developer referral. Programmers like and trust the language, so it snuck its way in from the bottom up on both Windows and UNIX systems. The PHP creators recognized this and began Zend -- a venture to address the real-world needs of IT management, such as performance, code obfuscation, and rapid development tools -- with tremendous success.
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Zend products address the specific needs of enterprise developers, making PHP a viable solution for high-traffic and proprietary Web sites. Because there is no license fee, the total quality solution provided by Zend costs much less than deploying other technologies without compromising on deployment features.
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