Archive for the 'zend' Category
Interview with the co-founder of Zend Technologies
By Justin Silverton
Recently, there was an interview with the co-founder of zend technologies, Andi Gutmans.
Here are some interesting questions addressed:
“InfoWorld: Why do you think PHP is the most popular?
Gutmans: I think because of our very, very strong focus on the Web. We’ve always been the most efficient when it comes to developing Web applications. And also it’s a very, very easy language to pick up. So you don’t have to have to be a software engineer or a computer science graduate to use PHP. I often say that PHP is the Visual Basic of the Web. You can just be kind of an ad hoc developer, no real formal training, and be very, very efficient. ”
I’ve often wondered the same thing myself. Why is PHP so popular? Wikipedia states that it is currently the 3rd most popular language on the web. It might have to do with it’s ease of use. Because it’s type-less and has many web-related features built-in, a beginner can easily pick it up and start coding applications.
It also might have to do with the nature of the open source community. The fact that PHP is open source means that when you use it to build your applications, you aren’t at the mercy of any one corporation. The problem with utilizing proprietary technologies built by large corporations is that when they change the standards, you are forced to comply (and could possibly lose support). Open source means a community of support that could be around much longer than the the previous version.
“InfoWorld: What is your take on the Oracle announcement last week about supporting Red Hat Linux? Do you think this is a death knell for Red Hat?
Gutmans: I’m not sure. If Oracle succeeds, I don’t know if it’s a death knell. I think still a lot of vendors are going to prefer kind of the best-of-breed vendor for Linux. But [Red Hat] could lose some business, especially the Oracle business. [Red Had has] got some pricing pressure… There’s obviously another option, which is that Oracle is just trying to drive down the price [of Red Hat stock]. And maybe this is a one- to two-year plan to actually acquire Red Hat. ”
Oracle has shown the volatility of a business based on open source (Redhat’s stock price dropped shortly after the announcement of their interest in the distro). Since Redhat’s core business is based on something any company could do, a larger company (one with more resources and money) has a chance of beating them at their own game.
Redhat isn’t gone yet, however. They still have a lot going for them. Many of the features and additions found in the latest redhat distribution are created by the developers hired by the corporation, which will take awhile for oracle to replicate.
The Zend Framework
By Justin Silverton
Introduction
The Zend Framework is a recently released (still in alpha) set of open source tools for php designed for developing Applications and Web Services.
Included Functionality
Zend_Controller and Zend_View
These components provide the base for a simple MVC website and are already used on this site and several others. A front controller dispatches requests to page controllers. It is as minimalist as possible and we’re working to make it even simpler. The Zend_View component provides encapsulation for view logic. It can use templates written in PHP or can be combined with a third-party template engine.
Zend_Db
Database access is a very light layer on top of PDO. Solutions existing systems not using PDO (such as mysqli or oci8) are presently under development. Included are adapters, a profiler, a tool to assist with building everyday SELECT statements, and simple objects for working with table row data.
Zend_Feed
The links on the sidebars of our home page are generated using Zend_Feed. This component provides a very simple way to consume RSS and Atom data from feeds. It also includes utilities for discovering feed links, importing feeds from different sources, and feeds can even be modified and saved back as valid XML.
Zend_HttpClient
This component provides a client for the HTTP protocol and does not require any PHP extensions. It drives our web services components. In time, we will develop support for extension-based backends such as cURL.
Zend_InputFilter
The input filtering component encourages the development of secure websites by providing the basic tools necessary for input filtering and validation.
Zend_Json
Easily convert PHP structures into JSON for use in AJAX-enabled applications.
Zend_Log
Log data to the console, flat files, or a database. Its no-frills, simple, procedural API reduces the hassle of logging to one line and is perfect for cron jobs and error logs.
Zend_Mail and Zend_Mime
Almost every internet application needs to send email. Zend_Mail, assisted by Zend_Mime, creates email messages and sends them. It supports attachements and does all the MIME dirty work.
Zend_Pdf
Portable Document Format (PDF) from Adobe is the de facto standard for cross-platform rich documents. Now, PHP applications can create PDF documents on the fly, without the need to call utilities from the shell, depend on PHP extensions, or pay licensing fees. Zend_PDF can even modify existing PDF documents. Create a sharp customer invoice in Adobe Photoshop, fill in the order from Zend_Pdf, and send it with Zend_Mail.
Zend_Search_Lucene
The Apache Lucene engine is a powerful, feature-rich Java search engine that is flexible about document storage and supports many complex query types. Zend_Search_Lucene is a port of this engine written entirely in PHP 5, allowing PHP-powered websites to leverage powerful search capabilities without the need for web services or Java. Zend_Search_Lucene’s file format is fully binary compatible with its Java counterpart.
Zend_Service: Amazon, Flickr, and Yahoo!
Web services are becoming increasingly important to the PHP developer as mashups and composite applications become the standard for next generation web applications. The Zend Framework provides wrappers for service APIs from three major providers to make the as simple to use as possible. We’re working on more and engaging API vendors directly to make PHP the premier platform for consuming web services.
Zend_XmlRpc
PHP 5’s SOAP extension dramatically lowered the bar for communicating with SOAP services from PHP. Zend_XmlRpc brings the same capabilities to XML-RPC, mimmicking the SOAP extension and making these services easier to use than ever from PHP 5.
Conclusion
The Zend Framework looks promising, but I think that in its current state, it is more of a set of classes than an actual framework. Currently, PEAR is a much better choice in terms of community support and component availability. I am glad that Zend is continuing to embrace the open source community and I will be curious to see the future builds of this framework.
Download
It can be downloaded Here
The php zend engine
The Zend Engine is the internal compiler and runtime engine used by PHP4. Developed by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, the Zend Engine is an abbreviation of their names. In the early days of PHP4, it worked as follows:
The PHP script was loaded by the Zend Engine and compiled into Zend opcode. Opcodes, short for operation codes, are low level binary instructions. Then the opcode was executed and the HTML generated sent to the client. The opcode was flushed from memory after execution.
Today, there are a multitude of products and techniques to help you speed up this process. In the following diagram, we show the how modern PHP scripts work; all the shaded boxes are optional.
PHP Scripts are loaded into memory and compiled into Zend opcodes.