2.1.7 The Zend RelationshipThis is NOT the latest copy of this book; click here for the latest version.
After having revolutionised PHP by creating PHP 3, both Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski went on to design and create PHP 4, another revolution for the language - no longer would each line of code need to be interpreted as it was read, because Andi and Zeev made the language compiled.
They did this by creating a new engine for the language, known as the Zend Engine - as well as making scripts compiled, the Zend Engine also offered much more flexibility to the programmers of PHP itself, making it easy to port across platforms and servers. The Zend Engine was the first product to come out from Zend, a company founded by Andi and Zeev to create commercial products for PHP. The Zend Engine itself, being an integral part of PHP, is completely free and always will be, however Zend also produce a variety of other products for PHP, including a development environment, a script encoder, and more.
Having two out of the three language architects working for them gives Zend a big advantage in the market place, and as such they produce some excellent products. We will be covering some of their products, as well as their competitors, later in the book.
|
Want to see this stuff in print? PHP in a Nutshell takes the core topics covered here, adds in thousands of edits from the editorial team and myself, and combines them to make an unbeatable reference for PHP programmers at all levels.
My latest book has hundreds more tips on how to use PHP, Apache, and MySQL, plus Perl, Python, shell scripts, performance tuning, and more!
|
