Zend: A PHP Application ServerZend technologies came up with a PHP application server product line in early 2009 and it was named Zend Server. It comes with production support for Windows and Linux. There are two versions available for Zend Server: Zend Server and Zend Server Community Edition. IBM iSeries support is present in Zend Server 5 and it is supported on x86 and x86-x64 compatible machines.

It is supported by Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora Core, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Debian and Ubuntu on Linux and Windows Server 2003/ 2008, XP, Vista and Windows 7 on Windows platform.

Features:

Application Deployment: many a times it happens that erroneous application deployment slows down the whole process. Using Zend Server this process of PHP application deployment can be automated and standardized. It gives advantages like:

Application packages consisting of source code, meta data and scripts can be created easily.

The applications can be deployed on number of servers simultaneously.

Rapid deployment and removal is possible

Use with Magento and Drupal is possible

PHP Caching and optimization: Multiple PHP caching operations like bytecode caching, data aching, URL-based page caching help in development work to go at maximum speed. Zend Server provides optimization at several levels which is useful in the development of applications.

If you hire PHP developer who uses Zend Server for PHP web applications then you can expect your work to be perfect if the developer is having sound knowledge of using it.

PHP Monitoring: While in the development stage there are many problems faced by programmer which are unrelated to coding part. Zend Server helps you to keep a watch on all such errors like PHP errors, high memory usage, slow request execution, etc. And helps you to solve all these problems by providing details.

Code Tracing: In an airplane there is always a black box which records all the flight data. Similarly Zend Server Code Tracing is such flight recorder for PHP. It captures the full execution of the application in real time whether in production phase or testing phase. Because of this rather than reproducing the steps which led to failure the root cause can be found out quickly.

Zend Server code tracing is activated as soon as there is some problem. Data which is recorded by it includes:

Function calls tree Arguments Return values Duration Memory usage Line of code File name

Job Queue: There are few processes like order-processing, database cleanup, pulling of RSS feeds and report generation which are executed asynchronously. For this Zend Server incorporates Job Queue which can manage and execute such jobs to reduce server load and improve performance.

High Availability: The PHP application which is created should be distributed across a cluster of multiple servers so that at the time of server failure the services are not affected. For this purpose Zend Server provides built-in PHP session clustering capabilities. If a different server handles the user request then the session will fail over and end-user won’t see any degradation in services.

About the author: An author is a lead PHP programmer of web PHP applications and has been much benefited by the Zend Server in many ways. She says that you can hire a PHP developer from India at affordable rates for all your PHP requirements.