ZendCon wrap-up and welcome phpcloud.com!

We just wrapped up the 7th ZendCon event last week in Santa Clara, and the enthusiasm of the PHP community was inspiring. PHP is gaining momentum across industries and geographies, powering the web, helping people build amazing apps with ease, proficiency and creativity. In so many ways, PHP is making a difference, from legacy modernization to mobile app development and cloud deployments. And PHP is the basis for Drupal CMS, Magento e-commerce, Joomla and Wordpress, platforms used by millions of people. It is gratifying to see the innovation in our community, which is now about 5 million developers strong, and Zend is proud to be part of it, with the introduction of phpcloud.com – which is like a triple play in the cloud.

First up is Zend Developer Cloud, a sandbox where PHP developers can get started and develop great apps with no need to build a PHP stack or spend time maintaining a PHP environment. They’re literally just a few clicks away from productive coding in Zend Developer Cloud. This represents a step function in improved productivity similar to what Web application frameworks delivered 6 years ago. Unlike many other cloud platform providers, Zend is clearly placing a major emphasis on development, which is where we believe successful cloud initiatives begin, and where customers are investing time and resources for the greatest benefit.

Here, developers can really work together in the cloud, creating containers and snapshots of their app stacks so others can join a project in progress, and collaborate productively. Troubleshooting and enabling the development of high quality code is also a major focus and the Zend Developer Cloud provides powerful tools such as our code tracing technology, and browser integration to deliver proactive alerts while developers are writing and testing code. We want to cater to all PHP developers, who may use everything from vim to Zend Studio. For those who use Zend Studio, we’ve integrated it with Zend Developer Cloud to make the developer experience seamless. Like other editors or IDEs? The open source Zend SDK will enable Eclipse PDT and other tools to be integrated with Zend Developer Cloud.

Next up is production, where the Zend Application Fabric provides an elastic, highly available platform with a complete stack — PHP runtime, a full range of extensions, and Zend Framework. Zend Application Fabric is powered by Zend Server to provide the PHP application monitoring and code tracing that developers have come to rely on. The ability to find and fix issues quickly without having to recreate them means that precious time once spent on troubleshooting can be refocused on coding. And third is a strong partner ecosystem. For developers who work in the Zend Developer Cloud, their code will be ready to deploy to any cloud that supports the Zend Application Fabric. This includes partnering with Amazon Web Services, Rightscale, Rackspace and IBM SmartCloud today, and more to come. And, developed apps can also be deployed on-premise with Zend Server to take full advantage of automated on-premise deployment and delivery benefits.

As we enter this new era of productivity and choice for Web developers, Zend will continue to innovate and build on a fully integrated and seamless development experience, delivering the best, elastic application platform and working with a strong partner ecosystem to deliver a cloud runtime environment where and when you want it.

Happy PHP’ing!!