PHP4 EoL - How will Users React?

Infoworld wonders how the response will be to the, in my view, much overdue announcement that PHP 4 will be retired. In a way open source communities are no different from commercial corporations, they need to focus on what has impact and minimize deploying resources to activities that make less of a difference. We will look back upon this decision as one that helped us maintain the health of the PHP ecosystem.

In Zend’s customer base we have seen the switch from PHP 4 to PHP 5 happen about a year ago. Commercial use of PHP is based on PHP 5 in large majority of cases we see nowadays. Now that the leading open source projects like Drupal and PHPMyAdmin are switching, there really is not much reason left to continue to support PHP 4. There are also very many hosting companies available who can provide hosted servers that run PHP 5.

Companies looking to justify the migration cost should consider the improved performance characteristics and the improved security of PHP 5 among others.

Zend has made PHP 5 (in fact PHP 5.2 or better) a requirement for its recently released Zend Framework, which I think will be seen as the killer application for PHP 5. PHP 5 plus Zend Framework is the perfect platform to base your next generation of modern web applications on.

Zend is already helping many companies that are switching from PHP 4 to PHP 5 and will continue doing so in the coming year.

(PS 7/16/2007: News.com ran a story on the announcement. It is pretty balanced, but it is clear that the debate will not go away any day soon.)

Zend Conference 2007

We are making good progress with the plans for the Zend Conference 2007. We have more content this year than ever before, as we have gone from to format of 33 sessions to one of 48 sessions. As the confirmations from speakers come in, the information about the program will be posted in the coming days.

In addition to that we will have an ‘Open Space’ room that can be used for sessions that are not on the main schedule. The room will have three clusters of whiteboard, monitor and chairs, that can be used by groups of 5-20 attendees and will operate during the day and evenings, except during keynotes. We still need to decide on the scheduling mechanism during the conference, but to get you started we have opened a “Birds of a Feather” page on the conference wiki.

The first idea has already been posted by Keith Casey. It is still early days for registrations, so keep an eye on the wiki to see how the number of proposals will grow when we’ll get closer to the conference.

YourPHPMySQLParty

If you plan to come to Oscon, the O’Reilly open source convention, in Portland, you should stop by at the YourPHPMySQLParty on Tuesday July 24 at 5:30pm at the Doubletree Hotel, a 5 minute walk from the convention center.

MySQL and Zend Technologies will provide drinks and snacks and we are inviting all our open source friends at the convention to come over.

At Oscon there is as much to learn from the first-rate presenters as from your fellow attendees and at the party you will meet both. So it will be educational for most, or at least for some. But it will absolutely be fun for all!

The details:
Read the rest of this entry »

Andi is one of the 40-under-40

To celebrate its 40th year, Computerworld has compiled a list of 40 innovators, younger than 40 years old, who make a big difference in the IT world. It has become a very impressive list, you should all check it out on the Computerworld website.

Zend Co-Founder and Co-CTO Andi Gutmans has been chosen as one of those 40 young innovators (see him at #16). Congratulations to Andi! It is very deserved recognition of the work Andi is doing. It is also something we at are all a bit proud of at Zend, as it reflects the success of our company as well.

Zend Framework 1.0

We launched Zend Framework 1.0 on July 2. The feedback so far has been very positive — we had surpassed 1 million downloads before the release, and since then the download run-rate has more than doubled, so 2 million downloads should happen before 2007 is over. More importantly, Zend Framework already plays a role in production systems at surprisingly many companies. When we asked on the Framework mail list, we got over 200 samples, many of which we’ll be able to make public over time.

A nice example was Right Media, a company which runs an online advertising exchange. The story was published on the framework site and last week got a very nice write up in Informationweek with a headline stating “Right Media’s use of the latest Zend Framework may give Yahoo the means to counter Google’s dominance in online advertising.” If Yahoo succeeds, maybe they can donate a bit of their gains to the framework project.

Here are some other mentions we got in the press:

InformationWeek: “Zend To Release Rapid Development Platform For PHP. The framework will connect the application to databases and networks, leaving developers free to concentrate on user interactions and the business logic behind them.“

InfoWorld Online: “Zend PHP framework set for Web development. The 1.0 version of technology will suit mainstream developers, analyst says.“

Dr. Dobb’s Journal: “Zend Releases Open Source Framework. Zend Framework 1.0, an open source PHP development tool.“

InternetNews Online: “Zend Framework 1.0 Ready To Compete“

ZDNet Blogs: “Zend Framework hits 1.0 milestone“

Let me end with a quote from our friends at Varien:

“The Zend Framework powers our new open-source eCommerce platform, Magento. It has allowed our teams to rapidly develop using enterprise level architecture and structures that the framework suggests. The libraries available throughout the framework have proven to be highly optimized, thoroughly tested, and have streamlined our development process greatly.”

– Roy Rubin, Varien ()

Zend Sales Blog

Here’s the first blog entry from the Zend sales side of things. We don’t often write about this part of the business as geeky entries tend to predominate these pages. So I’ll shed a little light on what goes on in the Tel Aviv sales department in Zend.

Fridays tend to be quiet here as many customers seem to play low key today. After answering the emails from yesterday, I make some calls to downloaders of the Zend products and see how the install went. Nice call to a large British professional society who is testing the Studio and Platform and are considering moving from Java to PHP (nice idea guys) and this would bring some good business if it happens like they say, in a few months.

The usual rash of tech support and licensing issues calls came in by email and chat. We could spend hours just answering support questions from Chinese and Indian downloaders of the Optimizer. Someday these markets may produce significant numbers for us if we ever learn how to tap them, and if they have the budget to buy our applications.

I found out from MocoNews that Extreme Mobile is to start operations soon and see that their front end site is in php. Got the contact name and will see what we can do together.

The rest of the afternoon will be taken up by some more calls to customers, and also some research on new markets we want to branch out to. This is an essential part of our efforts as we try to enhance the already strong demand with new sources of business.

The Zend Business Conference in London earlier in July was a big success from our end. Had the chance to meet lots of our existing customers personally, and also some new ones. The reviews were overall positive and many attendees wanted to see more conferences of this sort in the future. We hope to oblige. We get the impression that php use is growing rapidly in the UK, as evidenced by a sharp demand for developers. Maintaining a high profile in the market will motivate developers to use the Zend solutions for their work.

Hope to come back rather often with new entries and news tidbits on Sales from Zend.

-Howard

PDT 1.0, Eclipse Board Meeting and IP Issues

IP (intellectual property) approval became something personal to many people involved in the Eclipse projects’ development.  I could say that from our side, we (project committers) had the biggest relief when we were notified that our IP issues have been resolved.

The highlight was this week when i actually met the people involved in these approvals and got the chance to hear the process they have been going through to make this happen.

I must say that it sounds quite a pain going through this and i have much respect to what they’re doing.

PDT 0.7 was actually canceled because we didn’t have the approval on time and we didn’t want to postpone it all the time so we decided to have one last Release Candidate of 0.7 and to proceed to the next version of the PDT - 1.0.

PDT 1.0 is going to be very much like 0.7 but with stability improvements and bug fixes.

We are also going to come up with Summer Camp of features we want to develop but we need the community help in that. Further information can e found in: http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/summer_camp.php

Rewriting history

When I was getting ready to go to work this morning I tuned in to CNBC World and saw George Bush deliver a speech ahead of his trip to the G8 meeting next week. In the speech he outlined the United States’ leadership role in the fight against global warming. Mine is not by any means a blog about political viewpoints, but as a marketer I am fascinated by the apparent impunity with which leaders can rewrite their own history.

Which is why I had to think about another leader, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who takes a refreshingly different approach.

In a recent blog posting he made a surprisingly frank assessment about Sun’s recent failing for a company CEO. “Sun was under pressure in the market. Although many users loved our core Solaris operating system, others thought it was built for high end computers, not grid systems. Our computer business had failed to keep pace with the rest of the industry - which meant our volume systems looked expensive. In combination, and with a poor track record of supporting Solaris off of Sun hardware, we gave customers one choice - leave Sun. Many did. Those were the dark days. Where did they go? They went to GNU/Linux, a free and open source operating system built by a growing community, running on x86 systems.”

He then goes on to say how Sun moved on from there. How they were advised to litigate Linux providers, but how instead they chose to compete by innovation and not by litigation. Jonathan is claiming good progress as a result, and at Zend we can observe the increasing strength of Solaris through our customer interactions. Even without the field validation I would tend to trust his claims - the frankness of his assessments and the tradition he has built of open communications through his blog, are tremendously valuable to Sun customers and eventually to Sun itself.

Microsoft (see: “Microsoft takes on the free world“) should also pay attention to Jonathan. “All of which is to say - no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach. That’s not a genie any litigator I know can put back in a bottle.”

Microsoft’s “Licensing, not Litigating” messaging does not add value to this debate over patents. The Novell deal shows that company only licenses because it wants to avoid litigation, so licensing can not be separated from litigation.

Microsoft is already proving it can do better. Zend has nothing but positive to report about its cooperation with Microsoft. It is not based on any explicit or implied threats and it has already produced measurable improvements for PHP - a win for the PHP community, for Zend and for Microsoft.

Encode and Obfuscate Smartly with Zend Guard 5.0 (Beta for now)

Hi All,

Zend Guard 5.0 beta is now available for you to evaluate and check the new cool features.

Some of the features are PHP 5.2 support, new cool GUI based on Eclipse RCP to manage your projects and ONE configuration file that can be executed from the GUI or from the command line with all the different encoding and obfuscation configuration.

For those of you who are not familiar with encoding and obfuscation of PHP code, it’s time to get into business if you want to have your code secured, scrambled and even run faster.

In order to experience the new Zend Guard 5.0 Beta together with Zend Optimizer 3.3.0 Beta, go to http://www.zend.com/products/zend_guard/zend_guard_5_0_beta.

Feedbacks are more than welcome - guard-feedback@zend.com.

Yossi Leon.

Real close now

Zend Framework is getting real close now to its official release. Bill Karwin just announced a 0.9.2 version, and states we may have one more interim version before we get to release candidate 1. Go to framework.zend.com to see more about the project, including all the detail on the components, the documentation and more. There is also a mail list that makes interesting reading. Here is an exchange from today that shows how folks feel about the progress:

From: Maurice Fonk
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 4:56 AM
To: fw-general AT lists.zend.com


Subject: Re: [fw-general] Zend Framework 0.9.2 release plan
I too would like to say thank you to all of you who have put in effort to make the framework into what it is today. I don't know if this is the right place for praise, but I really enjoy coding using the framework as my base. Things that used to take me hours of hacking, googleing and trial-and-error just work for me now, with zfw's consistent and easy to understand components. Thank you, all of you.

Maurice Fonk

Michael Depetrillo wrote:
> Great job on the framework! I haven't contributed yet, but have been
> using it exclusively for work projects since 0.2. It has come a long
> way and so has my knowledge of php 5, mvc and Object-oriented
> programming. I am a big fan of everyone who has contributed. Thank
> you.
>
> On 4/5/07, *Bill Karwin*
> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Friday at noon Pacific time (8:00pm GMT) I would like to call a
> code-freeze to make a Zend Framework 0.9.2 Beta Release.
>
> There have been 68 issues resolved since 0.9.1 and the project is
> gaining quality and completeness with each release. Congratulations
> and thanks to everyone who is contributing to this effort.
>
> We may do another Beta Release later in April, before we call it a
> 1.0.0 release candidate 1. It's not decided yet.
>
> Regards,
> Bill Karwin
>
> --
> Michael DePetrillo