The significance of the release is that it provides an onramp to the popular PHP dynamic scripting language more accessible to the large mass of Eclipse Java developers by at least making it available through the same tooling, with access to the same plug-ins. According to company cofounder Andi Guttmans, supporting Eclipse acknowledges the fact that there are many developers with feet planted in Java for the back end, and PHP for the Web 2.0 front end. “Java is a large part of our audience,” he told us. The attraction is that, while POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects) are simplifying the back end, they remain overkill for the front.

Specifically, feedback from the Eclipse beta resulted in addition of path mapping, which aids debuggers (e.g., once a file is mapped, Studio knows how to map all files that use a similar path mapping); the ability to export “unit reports” (results of test cases) to an HTML or XML page that can be retrieved later; the ability to debug remote files; ability to configure PHP executables; and ability to override some code generation functions.

Zend also released the next version of its PHP server, Zend Platform 3.6, which bumps up features like improved clustering and caching for scalability, plus new diagnostic tooling for maintenance.

For instance, new root cause analysis features of Zend Platform 3.6 are designed for isolating issues such as when web page availability problems crop up. As for caching, the trick is making this traditional file-based technology work for dynamic languages, which are url, not file-based. So, just like a web browser’s cache might provide auto-completion when you type a url, the new version of Zend Framework applies a similar trick back at the server, by anticipating what url the user is about to request.

The key is that while PHP as a language has an elegant simplicity, it’s never been known for performance. So in a sense, PHP is where Java was in 1999, which was the awaiting of J2EE which cleared the way for a market of appservers that addressed the performance and scalability headaches of pre-enterprise Java. But the metaphor is not complete, as PHP is server scripting language for dynamic web pages, whereas Java was designed to incorporate persistence so it could be used for web transactional applications.

Release of both products comes after a year where support subscription growth roughly doubled. Obviously, Zend is best known for Zend Core, its certified distribution of the PHP language, and over the past year, the company likes to complain that it’s been overwhelmed processing lots of small orders. “Lots of larger corporations typically start with single orders,” said Guttmans.

---