Tuesday, April 7, 2009

New Zend Application Server released today

It was an exciting day here at Zend today, we officially released Zend Server into GA, and I have to say this is an important milestone for the industry. It reminds me of the time 12 yrs ago when I was working on another new server technology at Netscape the very first Java Application Server that started a whole new category of software and opportunities on the web. Well NSCP's app server was technically not the first version as NSCP merged with the first one built by Kivasoft and release the next version under the new NSCP name. But it was that next version that made a huge impact on the internet and the name change was one of those things that signaled a maturing of the corprate market that was ready to adopt application servers as solutions. Websites needed better Scalability, High Performance and productivity improvements over the old way of doing things on the internet back then.

NSCP App Server was the beginning of the shift away from client/server corporate initiatives and desktop apps development like powerbuilder and visual studio onto the web. As of today only 33% of these internal employee applications have moved in 12yrs to the web, and that's mostly because of the lower productivity and high startup costs of early app server solutions. Scripting languages like PHP improve things at the language layer, but a complete solution is needed to addresses best practices and gain even more productivity while developing your next web ideas. As Yogi said once "This is like deja vu all over again"

Now fast forward to today's release of Zend Server, it offers PHP websites enterprise capabilities without the complexity and overhead of those first generation Java App Servers. Sure it can help with High Performance, it has the fastest PHP Byte Code accelerator technology out there. No other PHP caching technology is faster either, not even APC, and if you are running PHP applications on Windows then there is no other technology that is more reliable and tested for production environments under stress then Zend Server. We've implemented an APC function mapping layer into Zend Server that will allow your PHP apps using APC calls to utilize the faster internals of Zend Server without need to change your app code. So examples like phpBB modified to use it will run on Zend Server without code changes, and run even faster but with additional capabilities that will surprise you. Like better troubleshooting.

Quickly pinpointing the root cause of a problem and the tools to reproduce them faster is a major feature developers are surprised about when they start to use Zend Server. Like a sports car that you test drive because it performs well on the road, you the driver soon fall in love with the internals. As you sit behind that wheel you'll really get a good feel of the Zend engine and quick acceleration, but also fall in love with all the other things that makes driving it special. So take the new Zend Server out for a spin, you will also find many surprises that will WOW you even more then the thrill for speed as you sit behind the wheel. I'll be blogging more about those in the next few weeks, but since we are on the topic of speed. I had a meeting with one of our closest customers today, and used Zend Page caching to make a new PHP app more then 70 times faster, took only a few min after installing the server. I'll show you how to do the same thing in opensource using Joomla and Drupal in my upcoming article.

1 comment:

Edward Kietlinski said...

Much of the performance capabilities in Zend Server are inspired by Zend Platform server though the GUI look different the functionality and capabilities are similar. If you want more info now about performance take a look at this webinar from Zend engineer Shahar about the capabilities of the enterprise edition of Platform. It will give you a good understanding of the same capabilities found in Zend Server in a single server mode. Note Zend Platform is multi-server and can cluster for performance/scalability and offloading jobs using the Job Queue.