057: All things Zend

The company behind Zend

• Zend Engine is a pre-compiler for PHP and is used internally in PHP's interpreter
• The Zend company and other products grew out of this
• Zend is now owned by Rogue Wave

What is Zend's role in PHP Internals?

• Rogue Wave employs a number of PHP core contributors
• Dmitry Stogov developed much of the basis for the PHP 7 Engine (codenamed phpng at the time) while at Zend
• Dmitry and others at Rogue Wave are working on JIT-compilation for PHP

The Zend Framework

• Component-based framework
• Focusses on configuration over 'magic'
• Promotes best-practices and maintainability over rapid development
• Used by a lot of large organizations
• Backed by a stable company

What's new in version 3?

• The framework is now decoupled across 61 'component' repositories instead of all the components living in a single repository - this promotes component re-use
• Contains multiple backwards-incompatible changes, but upgrading from 2.x is not too much of a headache and well documented
• Improved performance
• Improved developer experience
• Improved documentation

Apigility

• A quick way to create database-connected APIs
• Handles a lot of the overhead/boilerplate associated with creating APIs:
  • error handling
  • content negotiation
  • versioning
  • etc

PHP and Zend Framework Certification

• Proves you understand PHP and current best-practices
• Focussed on core PHP concepts, rather than language features of a particular version of PHP