Enterprise PHP

Zend Announces General Availability of Zend Server 5.0

2010-02-24T17:07:56Z

Zend Server 5.0 Reduces Problem Resolution Time by up to 50 Percent; Adds Job Queue for Improved End-user Experience; Includes Support for PHP 5.3

Cupertino, CA -- February 24, 2010 -- Zend Technologies, the PHP Company, today announced the general availability of Zend Server 5.0, a major new version of the company's PHP Web application server. New Code Tracing technology in Zend Server 5.0 enables PHP developers and administrators to slash problem resolution time by up to 50%. For the first time, users have visibility into the behavior of their code in production environments, with the ability to pinpoint the root cause of application issues quickly and eliminate the time-consuming and sometimes near impossible task of recreating problems in order to resolve them.

"Zend Server 5.0 is a huge step forward for businesses running business-critical PHP Web applications," said Andi Gutmans, CEO and co-founder at Zend. "With this new version we are delivering application monitoring and diagnostics as part of the base application server at no additional cost. The new Code Tracing technology revolutionizes how businesses can reduce time spent on problem resolution. This and other enhancements will help businesses deliver reliable high-performance applications and maximize end-user satisfaction while reducing development and management time and costs."

Makara Leverages Virtualization to Simplify Cloud Application Management

2010-02-02T17:12:01Z

Makara's Cloud Application Platform, now available as a developer release, helps developers easily deploy, scale and monitor mission-critical applications in the cloud

REDWOOD CITY, CALIF. - February 2, 2009 - After months under the radar, Makara today unveiled a brand new approach to cloud computing's most difficult problem: application deployment and management. Rather than retrofit system management software designed for traditional application environments to the cloud, Makara's Cloud Application Platform leverages the virtual layer to allow developers to rapidly deploy, scale and monitor applications in cloud environments. The product is freely available today as a developer release at www.makara.com.

"The widespread adoption of cloud computing is hitting a wall in terms of ROI because companies are not able to effectively manage applications, both inside and outside the enterprise, in a cloud environment. No one's going to run mission-critical apps without management, not in the data center and definitely not in the cloud," said Tim Guleri, Managing Director of Sierra Ventures. "Makara's Cloud Application Platform provides that missing link, enabling developers to deploy their apps and make them work with full management capabilities. Makara will get the cloud past the ROI hurdle."

Zend Framework Adds Support for Microsoft Windows Azure

2010-01-30T06:01:42Z

Zend Technologies have just announced version 1.1 of Zend Framework including support for Microsoft Windows Azure cloud services and the Deutsche Telekom Developer Garden platform. The new release also provides documentation and tutorial enhancements.

Microsoft Interoperability team noted on their blog :

With the new Zend Framework 1.10, by simply using the new Zend_Service_WindowsAzure component, developers can easily call Windows Azure APIs from their PHP applications and leverage the storage services, including Blob Storage, Table Storage and Queue Service, offering them a way to accelerate web application development and scale up on demand.
....

Jean Paoli, General Manager Interoperability at Microsoft offered a comment about this announcement: "PHP developers find the Windows Azure platform compelling, Microsoft's decision to contribute PHP-based Windows Azure components to Zend Framework helps demonstrate Microsoft's commitment to openness and interoperability by providing greater choice and opportunity for Microsoft customers and partners."

Elance Work Index Reveals Strong Demand for Qualified PHP Programmers

2009-11-17T05:34:18Z

Businesses Also Increase Online Hiring of Professionals with Translation, Illustration, and Android Application Development Skills

Mountain View, Calif. (November 17, 2009) - The Elance Work Index, which ranks the hottest 100 skills in today's online labor market, today revealed that for the third month in a row PHP (Personal Home Page Tools) captures the number one spot on the Index, placing PHP-skilled professionals as the most sought after independent workers online today.

Elance is also expanding its skill testing platform to augment Elance's existing 250 tests with new "Code Tests" that give technical experts in top programming languages like PHP a way to demonstrate their expertise in writing and debugging actual computer code. To launch the new PHP Code Test, Elance is sponsoring a 14 day "code-off" in PHP for its pool of skilled PHP providers-- offering $250 and a full-year premium membership to each of the coders who score in the Top 10 for PHP programming. The PHP "code-off" begins now and ends at Noon PST on November 30, 2009.

Despite the difficult economic environment, year over year hiring on Elance is up 40% in October and demand for online contractors in areas such as IT, marketing and administrative continues to grow as evidenced by the over 300,000 jobs posted on the site in the last 12 months.

PDF Generation with Zend Framework

2009-10-06T10:49:13Z

Generating print-ready well-formatted PDF documents with PHP is not an easy task. Traditionally, there are two main approaches to PDF generation with PHP. Given sufficient time and patience, both partially get the job done, but still leave a lot to be desired:

HTML-to-PDF: This approach is widely used in mainstream applications. Here an HTML document is programmatically created and converted to a PDF, using one of the many open source libraries ¹. Since HTML, however, is not a page-oriented format (as is PDF), it is impossible to perform a 1-to-1 mapping between HTML and PDF. Typical word processing file format features, such as header and footers, orphans and widows or even page numbers can simply not be represented in HTML.

Programmatic: This approach offers total control of the resulting PDF. However, it requires that the x and y coordinates of every line of text, every geometrical shape and graphic be set from program code ². Not only is this an extremely time-consuming solution, but is also very brittle: Every time a graphical designer changes the layout of a document, a programmer must re-work his or her program code.

VS.Php 2.7 Released with Silverlight Integration

2009-08-04T07:48:34Z

jcx.software released today VS.Php 2.7 for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005. New features in this release :

Silverlight 3 tools intergation
Improved IIS 7 and IIS 7.5 integration
New built-in web server engine
Internet Explorer 8 support including debugging JavaScript
Improved support for editing very large PHP files
Improved smart indenting and document auto indenting functionality
Bootstrapper installer automatically downloads and installs the Visual Studio shell if not present. Available for both 2005 and 2008 editions.

Below the press release :

August 3rd, 2009 - We pleased to announce the release of VS.Php 2.7 for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005. This release introduces a number of new key features and enhacements of existing features.

Silverlight

One of the most exciting new features is Silverlight integration. With VS.Php 2.7, you can develop Silverlight applications and host them in your server side PHP application. VS.Php makes it easy to develop, debug and deploy these types of applications.

With VS.Php 2.7, you can easily debug your server side native PHP application and your client side Silverlight application within a single debugging session. Silverlight and PHP can interact using a number of standard technologies like REST, SOAP and JSON.

Zend Studio 7 Released

2009-08-04T07:43:52Z

Zend Technologies released today version 7 of Zend Studio IDE with support for PHP 5.3 and a reduced memory footprint which make it faster. New features in PHP 5.3 are now supported by ZendStudio including namespaces, late static binding and closures; in addition to bundled PHP executables and debugging capabilities.

The new release provides also enhanced integration with Zend Framework, stronger object oriented capabilities with enhanced editing features, easy integration and support of ZendServer including local deployment for debugging, and finally the use of Eclipse Indexing and caching architecture, a better workspace modeling, and removed unneeded dependencies to speed up the IDE.

How Many Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby Developers Are There ?

2009-06-22T07:23:43Z

Davey Shafik posted recently a very interesting article making the case for PHP. It's not about comparing programming languages capabilities, but especially concerning access to people and market penetration. Davey pointed to an old post that gives an estimation of Perl, Php, Python and Ruby Programmers availability according to most popular search engines. I updated the estimation so we can have most accurate results. The table below illustrates the results found, I have just truncated Bing results to 1M to have more readable chart, after all I don't believe there are 50M resumes indexed by Microsoft - and that's another topic.

	PHP	Perl	Ruby	Python
Google	788000	57000	14100	26300
Yahoo	541000	377000	41500	82400
Bing (MSN)	59700000	10200	18400	4900

Programmer's Resumes in Search Engines

Quality Assurance in PHP Projects

2009-06-15T12:51:40Z

Stefan Priebsch and Sebastian Bergmann, are writing a book on "Quality Assurance in PHP Projects". The book will be published in English and German at the same time later this year. The idea for the book is that Stefan Priebsch and Sebastian write the introductory as well as the concluding chapters while other authors contribute case studies for the middle part of the book.

An excellent idea that will provide amazing information and experience in quality assurance within any PHP project. It's interesting to see how different developers approach differently quality assurance in their PHP projects. The book target intermediate and advanced developers who are looking for Unit Testing best practice to help making stable and successful projects.

No need to mention that Sebastian Bergmann is the creator of the PHPUnit in addition to many others open source tools. Sebastian Bergmann and Stefan Priebsch are both Co-Founders and Principal Consultants with thePHP.cc that we have previously announced here. You can find abstracts of some case studies on the project website.

Zend Released Zend Server and Zend Server Community Edition

2009-04-08T08:29:52Z

Zend Technologies announced today the availability of Zend Server for High Performance, Reliable, and Secure Deployment of PHP-Based Web Applications, in addition to the FREE Zend Server community edition for Developers and PHP Application Users.

The new Zend Server is a complete Web application solution that includes PHP, native install, an enhanced code accelerator, and advanced monitoring and problem diagnostics for applications designed for deployment on a single server. In addition, Zend Server automates software updates, hot fixes, and security patches on both Linux (native RPM and DEB based repositories) and Microsoft Windows (MSI), for quick and easy installation in less than 5 minutes. Zend Server supports the most popular databases, including Oracle� Database, MySQL, and Microsoft� SQL Server, as well as leading operating systems from Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu/Debian to Microsoft Windows Server and more.

Zend Server CE is a completely free version of Zend Server that runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X, specifically tuned to address the needs of non-critical server deployments and for developer desktops/laptops everywhere. Zend Server CE comes with the same high-performance opcode caching and easy-to-use PHP administration capabilities as the commercial Zend Server.

Zend Server Pricing starts at $1,195 for an annual product subscription. More information and download www.zend.com

thePHP.cc, Fighting the Crisis with IT Quality

2009-03-05T17:12:57Z

In times of tight budgets, quality is a key success factor to reduce risks in IT projects. Three successful IT consultants and trainers have joined forces and founded thePHP.cc, The PHP Consulting Company.

thePHP.cc helps businesses and enterprises to reduce IT costs in the long term with Open Source technologies and PHP in particular.

thePHP.cc supports their clients in improving their employee's qualification to overcome skills shortages.

The three founders of thePHP.cc have long-standing experience in consulting, coaching, and training and are sought-after speakers at international IT conferences. They previously helped clients such as Cisco and Digg as well as government agencies.

Brand new knowledge base management software released - KnowledgeBase Manager Pro

2009-01-30T07:47:37Z

Website Scripts have recently released the Pro edition of their PHP Knowledge Base Manager. Knowledgebase Manager Pro is an web-based system developed to support and enhance the organizational processes of knowledge creation, storage, retrieval, transfer, and application.

It is featured with user and group management support, allows unlimited publications for your knowledgebase content, supports multiple ways of visitor feedback gathering, provides high safety of your data with built-in automatic database backup system, article versions history, and allows recovering of deleted articles. We made use of modern Ajax technology and followed Web 2.0 design and usability trends to make Knowledgebase Manager Pro knowledge base management software fast and convenient.

You can check the feature tour for more about the product features, and try out their online demo here

VS.Php 2.6 Release Focuses On The Enterprise Developer

2009-01-26T09:36:47Z

Miami, FL, January 25, 2009: Jcx.Software announced today the release of VS.Php 2.6 for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. VS.Php is the PHP integrated development environment (IDE) for Visual Studio developers. This version includes a number of features for the enterprise developer including:

Seamless integration with Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS 7), which allows developers to host their PHP project on their local IIS server. VS.Php configures PHP, Fast CGI and XDebug automatically. It also provides unique configuration for each Php project hosted in IIS, allowing developers to utilize custom settings in the php.ini for each project.
Support for very large projects with over 10000+ files. VS.Php is now optimized to load large projects quickly.
Project-wide IntelliSense, providing the developer with quick access to all classes, functions, methods and constants defined in the project. VS.Php provides two tabs in the IntelliSense pop-up, one for frequently used entries and another for project wide entries.
The ability to drag and drop files within the solution view, which allows the user to quickly copy or move files within the project. Also, the user can drag files to the references node for quick access in IntelliSense for the symbols defined in the file.
The latest version of Zend Framework, Php 5 and XDebug.

Jcx.Software continues their commitment to provide the best PHP development experience for enterprise developers. "With added support for handling very large projects and project-wide IntelliSense, VS.Php is a powerful tool for enterprise developers. We are pleased to leverage Visual Studio's ability to handle very large projects in the latest version of VS.Php." said Juan Rivera, Jcx.Software Founder.

Interspire Knowledge Manager 5.0 Released

2008-10-07T08:31:36Z

Interspire have just announced the availabilty of their Knowledge Manager solution version 5.0, previously known as ActiveKB (reviewed here). Mitchell Harper, Interspire Product Manager, wrote in product announcement :

This new version marks a significant step in our product strategy, turning the product from a simple web-based, self-service FAQ system into a fully-featured, enterprise-grade knowledge management tool which can be used to reduce customer support, share company-wide knowledge and reduce staff training costs.

New features in version 5.0 include:

Microsoft SQL Server & LDAP support - Easily integrate Interspire Knowledge Manager with your existing Windows-based Active Directory network and databases.
Complete workflow support - Setup content publishing rules and processes which allow knowledge workers and their managers to efficiently publish and approve knowledge items.
Integrated news posting and syndication - Post news items, information and upcoming event details directly to the front page of your knowledge base.
Index and search inside attachments (Word, PowerPoint - XP/2003/3007, PDF, etc) - Attachments can be uploaded and are automatically indexed and can be searched through your knowledge base.
Staff contribution reports - Assign contribution quotas to knowledge works and view reports outlining their contribution in the last day, week, month or custom date range.
and many more features

You can check also our support section powered by version 4.5 of Interspire Knowledge Manager under http://support.phpmagazine.net/. Product tour and demo of Interspire Knowledge Manager 5.0 are also available.

Intruder Consulting Counts On SourceGuardian To Safeguard Its Products

2008-08-10T09:52:39Z

Intruder Consulting, a telecom company based in Mexico, relies on SourceGuardian encryption software to safeguard its VoIP products. Intruder�s aCube software was extremely vulnerable to piracy by clients who had only leased the software for a specific term or who had not bought the entire system. The PHP files and database could easily be copied to another server.

SourceGuardian secures aCube�s PHP interface to prevent clients from running the application unless they have purchased the whole system, and it encrypts the PHP files, protecting the program by locking it to specific MAC addresses. In order to avoid losing important lease revenue, Intruder is preparing to use yet another feature of SourceGuardian �to ensure that clients who bought the software on a lease term pay their leases on time, or the interface will not work anymore,� says Intruder Consulting CEO Anton Krall.

SourceGuardian, which won a North East UK Export Award in 2004, is now used by thousands of professional web developers, programmers and companies worldwide. Adrian Teasdale, founder of Inovica Ltd., the UK company that developed SourceGuardian, says, �We are very proud to have created a product that assists companies around the world in protecting their valuable intellectual property.�