With Web traffic continually growing, it is safe to say that performance is a primary area of concern for anyone planning a major e-commerce site or Web-based application. PHP is a performance champion. In an evaluation of four Web scripting languages conducted by Ziff Davis’ eWeek, PHP came out the fastest. PHP was more than 3.5 times faster than the slowest of the four scripting languages, JSP. This evaluation was conducted without the use of the Zend Cache, which speeds the performance of PHP applications even further.

The laboratory tests demonstrating PHP’s high performance are confirmed by its real-world performance at many heavily trafficked Web sites:

• During the course of the Indy 500 automobile race, the Web site for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway gets over 2.5 million page views a day, a load it handles effortlessly using PHP.
• The PHP-based e-commerce Web site of Restoration Hardware, a $300 million a year retailer targeted to an upscale clientele, gets nearly three-quarters of a million hits on an average day. Almost all of the content is generated dynamically, with PHP pulling the appropriate data out of a database.
• AuctionWatch is an ASP e-commerce platform that enables businesses of all sizes to benefit from dynamic pricing environments. AuctionWatch has over 300,000 registered users, with 2.6 million unique visitors and 1.2 million auctions launched each month.

With such major successes in eBusiness, PHP now looks to growing adoption by large, high-profile enterprises. To ensure enterprise-level quality for PHP, Zend Technologies has created strong, reliable, commercial-quality products and services that address the issues of primary concern to enterprise users.

Today, enterprises at all levels face a hyper-competitive market. Whether creating eBusiness solutions, business applications, or intranet and extranet applications, enterprise players must speed performance and productivity and minimize time to launch. Using the most efficient and effective solution is crucial. Zend Technologies responds to the needs of the enterprise by delivering a line of products and services that increase application runtime speeds, boost productivity, and protect the intellectual property of an enterprise’s application scripts.

Zend’s value-added middleware products and services augment the inherent advantages of PHP and promise to advance the expansion of PHP into the enterprise by providing:

• Intellectual property protection
• Increased productivity and performance
• Quality-assured PHP configurations
• Additional features and functionality
• Professional support

Zend Technologies is already an internationally established brand name in the community of PHP developers and users. Zend’s founders are among the core developers of PHP and are the driving forces behind PHP 3 and PHP 4 – the two versions that "put PHP on the map." They are also the developers of the Zend Engine, the open-source scripting engine that drives PHP. This deep involvement in the PHP development world and in the open source community gives Zend Technologies a unique and unparalleled insight into the capabilities of PHP. Zend is currently the only commercial player in this field. No other company offers commercial-grade products, services, and support for PHP.

In order for commercial software developers to profitably distribute their applications, they must have some means of safeguarding their source code from copyright infringement and theft. Zend provides this protection for PHP users through the Zend Encoder Unlimited™, which enables developers to distribute PHP applications and create PHP-driven Web sites without revealing the source code.

The Zend Encoder Unlimited converts plain-text PHP scripts into a platform-independent encoded format. Encoded applications can be distributed to anyone and can run on any supported platform.

The Zend Encoder Unlimited also increases security by providing increased protection against reverse engineering and by ensuring that unauthorized users – internal and external – cannot access a Web site’s source codes or the source codes of the hosted site. Without the Encoder, the only alternative for companies wishing to protect their source code is to host their PHP applications on their own sites, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year in server costs. By providing intellectual property protection, the Zend Encoder Unlimited opens the way for the widespread acceptance of PHP for business and commercial applications, where protection of proprietary information is critical.

For high-traffic Web sites, which can process millions of requests per day, performance and efficiency are primary concerns. Slow download speeds and high latency times are major obstacles for e-commerce because they frustrate users and deter them from completing transactions. The Zend Cache directly addresses these issues by increasing the performance and efficiency of PHP-driven Web sites.

The Zend Cache is a customizable script-caching module that stores an intermediate code version of a PHP application in the Web server’s memory. Since the Zend Cache allows scripts to be stored in a pre-compiled format in server main memory, subsequent runs of the scripts are much, much faster due to bypassing recompilation of the script and decreased disk I/O (the server does not need to access the disk drive and read the script). Removing these two steps results in significant performance increases, and puts less drain on computing resources.

With the Zend Cache, a user will be able to support significantly more page views and transactions. By ensuring significant increases in the performance and scalability of PHP applications, depending on the complexity of the application, the Zend Cache delivers the best ROI of any conventional solution aimed at increasing the efficiency and performance of dynamic Web sites. For the end-user, this means significantly faster download times – particularly for high-traffic sites.

The Zend LaunchPad is an easily installed and quality-assured version of PHP that is pre-compiled for specific platforms and environments. It provides an easy-to-use platform for deploying and managing a PHP environment and enables the error-free installation of PHP packages. PHP sources are tested in Zend’s own labs, and results are stamped, ensuring that they have undergone various testing levels before release. The Zend LaunchPad includes an easy to use graphical user interface module that enables the user to select a personal PHP platform, server, database, and standards environment before downloading. The latest quality-tested modules are readily available through the Zend LaunchPad section on Zend's Web site.

The Zend IDE (Integrated Development Environment) provides the PHP developer with a consistent and streamlined environment to develop and debug their PHP scripts. It is designed to help developers speed the PHP coding of dynamic Web applications, significantly reducing time to market. Written in Java, the IDE is platform independent and supports both Windows and Linux. The IDE provides a full suite of customizable tools, including a powerful, intuitive window-based remote debugger that enables debugging scripts on a server; a customizable text editor, PHP and HTML highlighting, and HTML code completion.

Through its subscription plans, Zend provides a set of constantly updated Zend products and services for supporting and speeding the development of PHP and for deploying and maximizing PHP based Web applications. The subscription plan includes major version updates and special offers throughout the year. As part of its commitment to promote the proliferation of PHP as the scripting language of choice for the Web, Zend offers both commercial and non-commercial subscription plans. The non-commercial plan, designed for personal use, is geared toward the PHP freelance community and includes the Zend IDE and the Zend LaunchPad. The commercial plan is targeted for professional developers and vendors and offers online access to Zend’s technical support services.

The commercial subscription plan includes the Zend Encoder SE, like the Zend Encoder Unlimited, increases Web security and protects the intellectual property of a Web site or PHP applications. However, it enables limited distribution of applications through the Zend Encoder Runtime plug in. Subscribers may purchase this runtime option, in increments of 5, 50, and 100. Commercial subscribers also receive the Zend IDE, the Zend LaunchPad, and access to Zend’s Support-Online Services, a dedicated application designed to make it easy for users to receive responsive, knowledgeable support for either PHP or Zend products.

PHP and the Zend products provide enterprise-scale functionality at all levels of application development and deployment. As the recognized leader in PHP technology, Zend is leading the PHP revolution into the enterprise by delivering scalable, solutions for the rapidly growing base of PHP enterprise customers.