OK, so far all that I’ve managed to do is install it and have a dabble with the config pages and go “oooh that looks pretty”, so this isn’t a hardcore review or anything.
Zend have unveiled their newest product, Zend Server… which is essentially Zend’s own W/M/LAMP stack, but with Zend Framework and other components Zend have written, including the very handy Zend Debugger. What does that mean? Well to me, that means there’s quite an easy choice for my web development at home – I just installed it in 10 minutes and now have a fully working WAMP stack I can develop on before pushing to my Linode test server. It was 100 times easier than any other WAMP stack I’ve worked with including XAMPP and the other ones I’ve tried. It has a very shiny web GUI as well (pictured), that – as I mentioned before – I went “oooh” at lots. I personally think Zend Server has the potential to be really frickin’ awesome if I get to know it better. From the Public Beta Invitation e-mail, Zend states it includes:
- Fully supported and certified distribution of PHP 5.2
- Fully supported Zend Framework 1.7 release
- Integrated native installers (RPM/DEB/MSI)
- Web-based administration Interface
- Comprehensive out-of-the-box database connectivity
- Powerful PHP monitoring capabilities to identify problems and help fix them quickly
- URL-based output caching required by today’s modern web applications
- Zend Optimizer+ – byte code cache to boost application performance
- New “Guard Loader” to enable processing of Zend Guard encoded files
Not bad – and there’s a community edition too, which means if you’re a sole developer like me it’s affordable.
<rant>Unfortunately, they don’t do a community edition of Zend Studio for Eclipse… and although PDT is good, I feel like its the hacky “well Zend Studio uses PDT at it’s core” alternative – without the cool enhancements that ZS has… oh well!</rant>
