Zend Server and how PHP sidled into the Enterprise

When Rasmus Lerdorf announced Personal Home Page Tools 1.0 in June 1995, I doubt that he had enterprise software development in mind. Fourteen years later, the CTO of Zend software, Zeev Suraski, shows me a slide. It has a large area shaded light blue, representing all the part-time or hobbyist users of PHP, and a thin strip of darker blue representing corporate PHP developers or ISVs (independent software vendors) offering PHP applications.

"Those two categories are growing significantly," says Suraski. "In 2006 we're talking about maybe 10% or less of the entire user base, whereas by the end of 2009 Gartner expects it to be about 35%. This changing demographics is a sign of maturity for PHP."

He would say that, of course, because that thin strip is Zend's potential customer base. The company sells a professional IDE for PHP, support services, and the just-released Zend Server which packages PHP along with commonly used companions such as MySQL. There is also an optimizer (technically an op-code cache), a Java connector, and the paid-for version has additional monitoring, debugging and caching components.

It is not just talk though: Zend is flourishing despite the recession - "the Q1 of 2009 has been our strongest quarter ever," says Suraski - and although PHP's enterprise market share is small compared to Java or .NET, it is growing.

What interests me is why this has happened. It is partly thanks to the merits of PHP, its speed and simplicity, and the fact that Java's libraries and to a lesser extent those in .NET are over-engineered for many tasks. More directly important though is that the community using PHP - the large area of non-paying users in Suraski's slide - has created a remarkable pool of resources on the Internet that is available to everyone, business users included. Non-commercial users are those most likely to share their knowledge, unfettered by concerns over business confidentiality or copyright.

I experienced this for myself recently, when I sat down to write a small PHP application. Every problem I encountered was quickly resolved with a Google search, or by looking at the discussion attached to entries in PHP's online documentation.

II don't mean to belittle the extent of online resources available to Java or .NET developers, but would argue that PHP has the edge here.

I also realise that it is no good just doing a search and adopting the first solution that seems to work. Developers need to understand what is being suggested and assess its quality, rather than optimistically pasting in the first block of code that seems to work. If PHP has a weakness, it is that the language does little to help developers write secure, maintainable applications, which may explain why there are so many vulnerable PHP applications out there.

So what about Zend Server? Note that this is not an application server in the WebSphere sense; it is primarily a PHP platform installer and support package, and as such not that different technically from what you can do with a Linux package manager or something like XAMPP.

I tried installing Zend Server on Windows Vista and bravely chose the IIS 7.0 integration rather than Apache. It actually worked smoothly and will be fine for developing PHP applications, though I would normally deploy to Linux, which I gather is a common scenario. That said, the work done by Zend and Microsoft makes PHP on Windows Server a reasonable option as well, and one that makes sense if you need to integrate with .NET, SQL Server or other Windows services.

The real winner here is PHP. Zend is making it business-friendly without damaging its open source ethos, and in doing so providing a great example of how free software can sidle its way into the enterprise.