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PHP and Zend

You don't have to surf the Web very long before running into pages written in PHP (which officially stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), an open-source Web scripting language. According to Netcraft's February 2001 survey of Web servers (www.netcraft.com), PHP is running on over five and a half million domains. Shop for Web-hosting services and you'll find they almost all offer PHP.

But though PHP thrives on hosted servers, it's too immature for a high-traffic business environment. As much as we were rooting for it to succeed in our testing, it failed;especially when we attempted to evaluate on Windows.

PHP is a scripting language with an engine for running the scripts. It comes with no tools at all. Setting it up on Linux or another Unix OS is a breeze if you're a Unix/ Apache expert. The PHP language is a bit of a mishmash of other languages; mostly Perl. Version 4 of PHP (we tested 4.04 patch level 1) significantly improved the power of the language, including adding easy access to Java code.

But PHP has some strange features. The normal way to do database programming is through an abstraction layer such as ADO or JDBC. But the PHP way is to use a database-specific API. There's support for over a dozen databases, including Oracle and Sybase, and the open-source MySQL and PostgreSQL. PHP proponents argue that abstraction layers dumb down and slow down access to databases, but we think they can increase developer productivity, facilitate application migration, and cut training costs.

PHP grew up joined at the hip with the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, and MySQL database. This combination is the most common configuration for PHP, and the language is optimized for it.

The Windows version of PHP, unfortunately, cannot be taken seriously for production environments. We were unable to get the ISAPI version working and had to test with the CGI version. We scanned the comments on the official PHP support forums and found that the ISAPI code frequently fails and that, even when it works, PHP extensions tend to fail because they aren't thread-safe. PHP on Windows should be used only for development. Developers seeking to use the Windows version should check out http://php4win.de/.

Zend Technologies (www.zend.com) sells a number of ancillary PHP products, including an integrated development environment and several performance-enhancing products.

The Zend IDE has very little going for it, the most important being that it supports server-based debugging;though only for Unix. The IDE has none of the better features found in other tools, such as syntax assistance. And there's no integrated help at all; all Zend documentation is in PDF files. If we have to make a trade-off between IDE and debugging, we'd rather use a better editor, such as Allaire's HomeSite, and deal with debugging the hard way.

Zend also sells Zend Cache, which can improve PHP performance up to twentyfold, according to the company, and the free Zend Optimizer statically analyzes and optimizes PHP source code. Applications can be distributed in tokenized form rather than showing source code using Zend Encoder.