Zend founder: No rush to upgrade to PHP 6_PHP Tutorial-PHP Tutorial-php.cn

Zend founder: No rush to upgrade to PHP 6_PHP Tutorial

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Release： 2016-07-15 13:26:20

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Zend is the protagonist of one of the many open source success stories, following a model that has proven successful with MySQL and Subversion, targeting enterprise customers who need a highly reliable, highly scalable web application server. Provide technical support and commercial software.

Previously, the company had announced the launch of Zend Server software, a highly integrated platform for running PHP applications on one to three servers. It includes a high-speed code caching feature that allows PHP applications to run faster. It can also monitor all PHP scripts on the user's server and alert the user when they are running slowly or making errors.

Now, Zend is launching a stripped-down free version of its enterprise software. In the Zend Server Community Edition, users get the same high-performance code execution and management interface, but they won’t get technical support, and when PHP updates You won't get instant upgrades at launch. Nonetheless, users can at least take advantage of its powerful features and easily save on costly hardware upgrades.

Zend founder Zeev Suraski recently gave an interview to the media and talked about the relationship between Zend Server Community Edition and its non-free version, and why his team took so long to develop PHP 6 etc.

Reporter: What are the similarities and differences between Zend Server and the existing Zend platform software?

Sulawsky: In the beginning, we plan to operate simultaneously To manage these two products, Zend Server is aimed at single-server solutions with up to two or three servers; while Zend Platform is aimed at large cluster environments. We have decided to gradually roll out the Zend Server strategy, so in the future we plan to add cluster support to Zend Server, as well as other features and new features on the Zend platform.

Reporter: In other words, your plan is to add the functions of the Zend platform to Zend Server?

Sulawsky: Yes, but not just adding features from the Zend Platform, we will also improve its user interface and ease of use, so in the future you will not see the exact same features in the clustered version of Zend Server, but improved versions of them; or With higher performance, or completely new features.

Reporter : One of the key features of Zend Server is that it is a highly integrated solution with software configured to run in a more optimized way. But users already have MySQL and Apache, do they really need Zend Server?

Sulawsky: It depends on what operating system you use. If you install it on a Linux system that already has Apache installed, then you don't need to install a new Apache, just use the one that comes with the system. But if you use other systems, you can install Apache through Zend Server, which will be very convenient.

Reporter: Can users use the PHP that comes with the system?

Sulawsky: No. Users must use PHP from Zend Server. Technically, you might be able to do this, but we don't recommend it and don't support it.

Reporter: Zend Server’s monitoring agent automatically tracks when scripts, database connections, or other PHP-related issues go wrong, and it is able to save application state so it can be restored later. Is this going to take a lot of resources?

Suraski: If the user has a really bad application, then it's going to generate a lot of these events and saving them will really take a lot of time. But under normal circumstances, user applications do not generate too many such events, and their resource overhead is almost negligible, about 1% to 2%. It depends on the number of events generated.

Reporter: Is it fair to say that Zend is entering an area previously dominated by Java application servers?

Sulawsky: In some way To a certain extent I think so. In fact it is already a fact in some respects. PHP has been used in many business-critical applications and has been deployed on a very large scale, such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr. This trend is growing and we think it makes perfect sense and are supporting it in Zend Server.

Reporter: On the other hand, as Zend Server makes PHP more enterprise-oriented, is it fair to say that PHP may be losing contact with its original community?

Suraski : I don't think so, but I would point out that PHP has been around for 12 to 13 years and it's no longer a newbie language. That said, I think the PHP community is still developing it and remains closely connected to the community that uses it. The PHP community is very healthy, it's very strong and still growing.

The key advantage of PHP is that it is a mature solution and this has been proven. Relatively few people know how to deploy websites using Ruby or Python, and they are both very good solutions, but their communities are much smaller than the PHP community. Of course, there is room in the web server industry for multiple products, and I don't think PHP will be used by all websites.

Reporter: Is it safe to say that the community’s open source products are affecting the functionality in the free version of Zend Server? For example, I think PHP 6 will include an optional code caching standard, do you think Will a corresponding version be released?

Sulawsky: This is one of the features we decided to add, but it’s not the only one.

Optional PHP Caching (APC) will become a standard for PHP, but it will not bring much change. It is already in the PHP extension library and users can install it very easily, and if the user pays attention to PHP 6 If so, you will find that it is not enabled by default. If people really like APC, they can disable the Zend Optimizer plug-in and use APC, which is identical except for a small part of the user interface that is Zend-specific.

Reporter: The development time of PHP 6 seems to be too long. Considering the situation with Perl 6, is the number 6 a curse? Or is it just part of the plan?

Suraski: Maybe, but I think PHP 6 will be in Python 6 launched before. PHP 6 is a more difficult project than PHP 4 and PHP 5 for two reasons: first, the PHP code base is now so huge; second, every small compatibility failure will become a nightmare for many people. And since PHP 6 will introduce support for native Unicode, it will inevitably bring a lot of compatibility glitches to the language. Frankly, I don't know what the end result will be.

Reporter: How difficult is it to switch from PHP 5 to PHP 6 compared to switching from PHP 4 to PHP 5?

Suraski : The migration from version 4 to version 5 was quite successful and only took a few years, but today PHP 5 is already more popular than the original PHP 4. We decided not to rush the upgrade, so we are focusing more on PHP 5.3 now.

We decided to add some new features in PHP 5.3 that were originally planned for PHP 6, such as namespaces, so that we don't have to rush to upgrade to PHP 6. It may take some time before PHP 6 is officially launched.