PHP Developer's Journal on Ulitzer

Zend Technologies, the PHP company, has hung Zend Server 5.0, which support IBM i as well as Linux and Windows, out for public beta.

A production release should be out by the end of the year.

The widgetry is a major new version of the company's enterprise-ready PHP application server, including Code Tracing, which is supposed to slash problem resolution time by up to 50%. For the first time, PHP developers and administrators should be able to quickly find the root cause of a problem in production by viewing a "digital documentary" of an application's execution and avoid the time-consuming task of re-creating the problem.

Zend compares the facility to a plane's black box flight recorder that captures the data required to analyze flight problems.

It's supposed to take root cause analysis to a whole new level. It captures the full execution of an application in real-time.

Code Tracing can be turned on and off by Zend Server's Event Monitoring capability so that real-time PHP code execution is captured only during specified events, such as those triggered by performance degradation or other error conditions. The trace is displayed in the Zend Server Web console.

Zend Server is supposed to have everything an organization needs to deploy and manage business-critical web apps, including the most up-to-date PHP stack for PCI compliance, advanced application monitoring and consistently high performance via code acceleration and page caching, according to Zend CEO Andi Gutmans.

Zend Server is integrated with Zend's Studio PHP IDE, Zend Framework.

Zend says end users experience snappy responses in their browser while long-running jobs like credit card processing run in the background.

Zend Server 5.0 also includes Job Queue, which increases application performance and responsiveness by allowing jobs (tasks) to be performed asynchronously or at recurring intervals, offloading long-running tasks from Web servers to back-end servers.

PHP runs 35% of the world's web sites.