Zend Press Relase

New Zend Engine for PHP Offers Significant Advantages to Web Developers Two members of the core PHP development team have announced Zend, a new engine for the popular PHP server-side scripting language for Internet applications. Advantages to Web developers include an up to one hundred-fold increase in speed and the ability to distribute scripts without revealing source code. --- Tel Aviv, 4 January 1999: Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, two members of the core development team for the PHP server-side scripting language, today announced Zend, a new, faster engine for the language that promises a host of benefits for the Web developers who use it. PHP 3.0, launched in June 1998, has quickly gained popularity with Web developers and is already incorporated in more than 250,000 World Wide Web sites globally. Zend gives a dramatic performance increase of up to one hundred times over the engine that currently powers PHP 3.0. "The performance gains from the new engine are remarkable," said Zend co-author, Zeev Suraski. "Our preliminary tests show that Zend executes the very same code much quicker than PHP 3.0, usually by an order of magnitude. The engine of PHP 3.0 was originally targeted at small-to-medium sized Web sites. By contrast, Zend can easily take the load of large-scale sites and complex pieces of code." "Zend will allow us to develop packages that were just not feasible using PHP 3.0," said the engine's co-author, Andi Gutmans. "For example, we intend to create a compiler that generates platform-independent binary code which will allow developers to distribute their scripts to clients without revealing source code." Gutmans added: "Unlike the upgrade from PHP/FI 2 to PHP 3.0, the Zend engine will be 100% downwards-compatible so no re-coding will be necessary to upgrade to the new engine." Gutmans and Suraski said that Zend will allow the development of additional products for PHP such as an optimizing compiler, a persistent compiled script registry, a profiler and a debugger that were not possible until now. Development on Zend will be completed in the first quarter of 1999, and a final release is expected on the second quarter that year. Companies willing to sponsor the development of Zend and the additional packages mentioned above should contact the authors at sponsors@zend.com. Biographical note: Prior to the launch of Zend, Gutmans and Suraski's work as part of PHP's core development team included writing the language implementation of PHP 3.0 and writing numerous modules for PHP 3.0 including MySQL, Sybase and Post. They are also in the process of co-authoring a book on PHP due to be published by O'Reilly and Associates. Both Gutmans and Suraski hold Bachelors Degrees in Computer Science from Israel's leading technical university, the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. For more information, visit http://www.zend.com/. -- PHP Development Mailing List http://www.php.net/ To unsubscribe send an empty message to php-dev-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For help: php-dev-help@lists.php.net