Zend Technologies Updates Zend Platform with Comprehensive New Capabilities to Improve Manageability

Zend Technologies Updates Zend Platform with Comprehensive New Capabilities to Improve Manageability, Performance and Reliability of PHP Web Applications

Platform 3.6 Introduces Page Caching for Zend Framework and Similar MVC Frameworks

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA – January 22, 2008 - Zend Technologies, the PHP Company, today announced the general availability of version 3.6 of Zend Platform™, the industry leading PHP web application server. Zend Platform 3.6 significantly expands the breadth and depth of its manageability, performance and clustering support for PHP, enabling organizations to better guarantee that their business critical web applications will meet end user’s quality, availability and response time expectations.

“The overall responsiveness and reliability of PHP web applications is determined by a wide range of factors. PHP developers and web administrators often struggle with a patchwork of technologies to identify and remove bottlenecks and causes of failure," said Mark de Visser, Chief Marketing Officer at Zend Technologies. “Zend Platform 3.6 offers a comprehensive solution to this problem. At every stage of the application lifecycle it helps developers and administrators understand and improve the quality, performance and reliability of their PHP applications.”

Zend Platform 3.6 delivers new and enhanced functionality in 3 major areas:

·         PHP Intelligence.  Zend Platform monitors PHP applications in real time and reports script errors, database problems, performance issues and more. It reduces downtime by recording full context for reported problems for easy “root cause” diagnostics and short time to resolution. The enhancements in version 3.6 include the ability to monitor HTTP, Apache and Java events, expanded performance alerts, and better diagnostics by enabling debugging of production problems on development servers.

·         Performance Management. Zend Platform improves the performance of PHP applications by caching pre-optimized PHP byte code and content in a number of ways. In version 3.6, the options for caching content have been expanded substantially, with support for file or URL based page caching, client-side caching and in-memory or disk based data caching. In addition to the powerful caching functionality, Zend Platform 3.6 also offers automatic output compression to save bandwidth, enhanced job-queues for deferred and offline processing and an improved download server for optimized delivery of large content and media files.

·         Cluster Management. Zend Platform provides support to scale PHP applications across clusters of servers, thereby improving application reliability and overall performance. Improved in Platform 3.6 are the high-availability options and the cluster configuration and support tools.

In Ticketing offers event organizers online ticketing and box office services, selling more than 1 million tickets per year. “Our business is characterized by very strong peaks of activity, so our web applications need to be able to perform well under very high transaction volumes,” said Marc Urbaitel, Co-founder and CTO at InTicketing. “During our recent start of sales of tickets for a major event we processed more than 20,000 job processes in the first few hours of ticket sales. We deployed an early version of Zend Platform 3.6 on load balanced web servers with a dedicated Job Queue server, which enabled us to process these transactions while maintaining very good response times on our website.”

“Zend Framework applications are generally built using a model-view-controller design pattern (MVC) that enables a separation of business logic and data from the visual user interface elements. The new URL-based page caching of Platform 3.6 will dramatically improve the performance of these MVC applications,” says Andi Gutmans, co-founder and co-CTO at Zend Technologies. “With over 3 million downloads to date, and many corporate deployments of Zend Framework, we are excited to be able to offer our customers this important new functionality.”

About Zend
Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP Company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications. PHP is used by more than twenty million websites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic web applications. Deployed at more than 15,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Zend is headquartered in Cupertino, California. For more information, please visit www.zend.com, or call 1-408-253-8800.

Zend, Zend Technologies, Zend Framework, Zend.com and Zend Studio and/or the logos and icons associated with each of these names are trademarks of Zend Technologies, Inc. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Jeff Koo
Sparkpr
415.321.1866
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