Sun Tech Days

Zend Announces Beta of Zend Server, Includes Java Capability

Zend today is announcing that it has opened a public beta of their new product called Zend Server. It's completely free for anyone to go download and try it out. Zend is really hoping for some good feedback to make this product the best it can be.

The interesting thing is that even the free community edition now includes their Java capability, previously only available to high-end customers. They feel this will enable a lot more in the Java community to experiment with PHP and gain some of the benefits of dynamic scripting languages like PHP, in conjunction with running Java code they may have already built and have running in production.

Zend Server is designed to be an all-in-one installer to get setup quickly with Apache, PHP, Zend Framework, and a PHP optimizer (opcode cache, very much a necessity with dynamic languages like PHP). It also comes with an admin UI to configure PHP easily. It uses native installers for various operating systems, and is available for Windows, Mac OS X (the CE edition), and Linux (.deb, .rpm or tarball).

There are two versions being released. The full Zend Server (which after Beta will be a commercial product, price to be announced), and Zend Server CE, which is a version completely free to use however you wish. The full Zend Server comes with the following additional features:

* Page Caching (based on URLs, no code changes necessary)
* Monitoring (email alerts on slow DB queries, broken code executions, etc.)
* Support & Hot Fixes (so PHP is always up-to-date)

If you are interested in trying out Zend Server for yourself, check out some of the following links:

* Learn more about Zend Server. http://www.zend.com/en/products/server/
* Download Zend Server (either edition) to try out in beta. http://www.zend.com/en/products/server/downloads-all