On October 23, 2006, Mr. Zeev Suraski, CTO of Zend and one of the builders of PHP, visited China to participate in the LAMP open source practice organized by Intel, Greatlinux, Turbolinux, Zend, MySQL, Comsenz and PHPChina website Summit Forum. During the meeting, he accepted an interview with Chinese IT media and expressed his views on new PHP products and development cooperation with Zend.
Zeev Suraski expressed admiration for the contribution of Chinese PHP programmers, and suggested that Chinese PHP programmers should maintain the good habit of continuous learning, "Getting started with PHP is very simple, but PHP is constantly having new features, so I hope that Chinese PHP programmers should not stop learning. PHP programmers should obtain the latest information and technologies from many PHP books and websites." He said that if a PHP programmer creates a PHP program without other commercial development purposes, make it public so that more people can participate. On the one hand, you can improve yourself, and on the other hand, you can improve yourself quickly. PHP program.
When it comes to PHP applications, Zeev Suraski said that PHP is not only used on the Web, but also has a huge market for PHP in industries such as automobiles, banks, and games. He said that Zend is also developing a standard development framework, Zend Framework, which is an enterprise-level PHP product. "As a company that supports PHP, Zeed should fill the gap of currently not having an enterprise-level PHP operating environment." "It has been Promote PHP towards enterprise-level applications."
Zend Company is the promoter of PHP
Q: Mr. Zeev Suraski, can you introduce Zend Company?
Zeev Suraski: My name is Zeev Suraski, I am one of the builders of PHP, one of the founders of Zend, and the CTO of Zend. I am very happy to come to China and see many PHP users today. Zend is a company dedicated to the development and promotion of PHP. It is also the only company in the world that can be called PHP because two of the three founders of PHP (Andi and I) founded this company, and we have been promoting it. Working with PHP, including revising PHP, adding new functions to PHP, etc. In addition, we have been pushing PHP towards enterprise-level applications. For example, the Zeed Conference 2006 we will hold next week is to make PHP towards enterprise-level applications.
Q: When talking about PHP, friends often talk about Zend. Excuse me, what is the relationship between Zend and PHP?
Zeev Suraski: Zend provides solutions for PHP, but that does not mean that PHP belongs to Zend. PHP belongs to the PHP community. More than 5 million people around the world are developing PHP. Zend is just a promoter of PHP.
Q: Can you talk about why you developed the PHP language back then? You know, around 1997, Web development languages such as ASP and JSP were already relatively popular.
Zeev Suraski: At that time, Andi (the other founder of the PHP language) and I were still college students. We needed to make a Web-based software project that could support Linux well. However, ASP was not very complete at the time, and JSP was not very complete. It was relatively complicated, so we chose PHP. Then, we found that PHP still had some shortcomings during our work, so we joined the expansion and development of PHP, and later developed Zend Engine. After joining Zend Engine, the performance of PHP has been greatly supplemented, and many people have begun to use PHP, which makes us very happy.
Q: .net is also one of the mainstream programming languages. Excuse me, what is the connection and role between PHP language and .net language?
Zeev Suraski: Microsoft and other companies are also fully aware of the importance of open source and promote the long-term development of .NET, so PHP and .NET coexist, and PHP can also be bundled with windows. I think what Microsoft wants to promote is the windows platform, and there shouldn't be much conflict with PHP.
PHP6 integrates many features such as Unicode
Q: What measures or strategies does Zend have to promote the development of PHP this year?
Zeev Suraski: First, we will work with Yahoo to develop PHP's Unicode module, and this feature will soon be available in PHP6. In addition, we are developing a standard development framework, Zend Framework, hoping that more PHP users can quickly build Web applications through it. Also, we will cooperate with IBM and uzo to launch Elicpse that integrates Zend IDE development features for everyone to use.
Q: In addition to Unicode, what are the other significant improvements in PHP6?
Zeev Suraski: Other features are still under development, such as web services. Web service will also start to be used in PHP5.X. At the same time, some features that were not very good before were removed. But no matter what, the two major features of PHP will not be lost: first, it is simple to use and stable; second, it will not increase performance consumption of PHP. In addition, we also hope that after PHP6 joins Unicode, it can be promoted more quickly in a country like China that uses Chinese characters.
PHP is also suitable for enterprise-level applications
Q: We all know that the PHP language is a very simple Web construction system. In addition to Web services, what are the applications of PHP? ?
Zeev Suraski: PHP can be used in Web-based products, such as CRM, OA, etc., such as SugarCRM, etc. In addition, PHP can also be used in many traditional fields. For example, abroad, PHP is also widely used in automobiles, games, banking and other industries.
Q: What is the purpose of Zend developing Zend Platform products? How should Zend Platform be used in enterprises?
Zeev Suraski: First, this is due to business considerations. PHP needs to move towards enterprise-level applications. As a company that supports PHP, Zeed should fill the gap of currently not having an enterprise-level PHP operating environment. Second, Zend Platform has many functions according to the specific usage needs of enterprises, mainly to help enterprises improve PHP performance, improve stability, and reduce development costs.
Chinese PHP programmers have contributed greatly to the development of PHP
Q: How does Zeev evaluate the level of Chinese PHPers?
Zeev Suraski: There are many PHP developers in China, and they are all relatively proficient in PHP. One thing I want to emphasize is that it is the contribution of China's PHP development engineers that makes the development of PHP what it is today.
Q: How should Chinese PHPers further improve themselves?
Zeev Suraski: Keep a good habit of continuous learning. Getting started with PHP is easy, but new features will continue to appear in PHP, so I hope that Chinese PHPers will not stop learning. PHPer should obtain the latest information and technology from many PHP books and PHP technology websites (such as: PHPChina.com). For enterprises, they should carefully understand PHP before using it, and then start using PHP for development. If a PHPer creates a PHP program and has no other commercial development purposes, make it public. This will allow more people to participate, which can improve yourself on the one hand and your PHP program quickly on the other.
Q: In China, PHP is regarded as a relatively low-end program developer. What do you think?
Zeev Suraski: First of all, we did not do very well in the Chinese market before, because the promotion of open source languages in China is not as developed as abroad. However, we will increase our efforts in the future, such as PHP6's Unicode. And we have cooperated with Comsenz to establish the PHPChina.com platform in China. We can use this platform to release the latest news about PHP to everyone in a timely manner, and at the same time, we can also listen to more PHPers' opinions on PHP through this platform. In addition, the reason why we develop some commercial products is to adapt PHP to the needs of enterprise-level applications. At the same time, we will also actively synchronize the Chinese cultural process of our products with product updates so that domestic business users can use them conveniently. I think Comsenz and PHPChina.com will help us achieve this.
PHP+Apache+MYSQL is the best combination
Q: For a website with more than 1 million users, what kind of PHP version, Apache version and MySQL should be used? Is it suitable?
Zeev Suraski: For individuals or companies who are just starting to use PHP, we recommend that you use the latest version. If you have been using PHP for a long time, there is no need to keep upgrading.
Q: Will the cooperation between PHP, MYSQL and APACHE continue to develop?
Zeev Suraski: Yes! MySQL is an excellent database, and Apache is currently the most popular Web Server. And the cooperation between us has been very smooth. We will strengthen our cooperation with MySQL and Apache in the future.
The biggest feature of PHP is simplicity
Q: What do you think of the future of PHP? Will it become as complex a development language as Java? Will you always stick to the characteristics of Web language?
Zeev Suraski: Yes, PHP ultimately appeared for Web development, and we have been adhering to this concept and will continue to do so in the future! We hope that PHP can become the best development language for web development. PHP can succeed because of two things: first, it is simple; second, it has received support from many PHP enthusiasts. So, starting from the first point, we will always keep PHP simple. Therefore, if we need to add a new feature in subsequent versions of PHP, if the new feature seriously affects the performance of PHP, we will definitely not adopt it. Some people have complained to us that PHP5 has become complicated, and some people have said that the functions of PHP5 are not powerful enough. Therefore, no matter what, we will keep PHP simple, easy to use, high-performance and other characteristics, there is no doubt about this market.
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