Zend Server Community Edition

Does anyone here have any opinion about Zend Server Community Edition?

I'm doing some tests here and I'm intending to use it at the University
Library where I work.

Any input about this web application would be nice.

TIA,

--
Marcos R. Cardoso
Seção de Documentação e Automação
Biblioteca Universitária
FURB - Blumenau
(047) 3321-0660


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RE: Zend Server Community Edition

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what flavour/edition/version?
=20
and what do you hope to gain by using it instead of just installing php =
+ mysql(?) on whatever webserver?
=20
Louis Solomon
www.SteelBytes.com =20
=20

________________________________

From: Marcos R. Cardoso [mailto:mcardoso@furb.br]
Sent: Fri 2009/10/23 10:18 PM
To: php-windows@lists.php.net
Subject: [PHP-WIN] Zend Server Community Edition



Does anyone here have any opinion about Zend Server Community Edition?

I'm doing some tests here and I'm intending to use it at the University
Library where I work.

Any input about this web application would be nice.

TIA,

--
Marcos R. Cardoso
Seção de Documentação e Automação
Biblioteca Universit=E1ria
FURB - Blumenau
(047) 3321-0660


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To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php




------_=_NextPart_001_01CA53E1.9B8323F0--

RE: Zend Server Community Edition

> ... Oracle connection ... Zend Server brought me the best results ...

Any more info on this statement? It's a bit on the vague side.

Personally I use custom install of php 5.3 (as fastcgi) on iis 6&7 with =
MS's wincache (php bytecode cache) and mysql. Works a treat for me and =
is very quick.

Louis Solomon
www.SteelBytes.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Marcos R. Cardoso [mailto:mcardoso@furb.br]=20
Sent: Saturday, 24 October 2009 12:11 AM
To: Louis Solomon
Subject: Re: [PHP-WIN] Zend Server Community Edition

I have installed the last version available on Zend.

My main issue is about Oracle connection, I've tried through the usual=20
way (installing PHP and Apache separately) but the Zend Server brought=20
me the best results so far.


Louis Solomon escreveu:
> what flavour/edition/version?
> =20
> and what do you hope to gain by using it instead of just installing =
php + mysql(?) on whatever webserver?
> =20
> Louis Solomon
> www.SteelBytes.com =20
> =20
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Marcos R. Cardoso [mailto:mcardoso@furb.br]
> Sent: Fri 2009/10/23 10:18 PM
> To: php-windows@lists.php.net
> Subject: [PHP-WIN] Zend Server Community Edition
>
>
>
> Does anyone here have any opinion about Zend Server Community Edition?
>
> I'm doing some tests here and I'm intending to use it at the =
University
> Library where I work.
>
> Any input about this web application would be nice.
>
> TIA,
>
> --
> Marcos R. Cardoso
> Seção de Documentação e Automação
> Biblioteca Universit=E1ria
> FURB - Blumenau
> (047) 3321-0660
>
>
> --
> PHP Windows Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
>
>
>
>
> =20


--=20
Marcos R. Cardoso
Seção de Documentação e Automação
Biblioteca Universit=E1ria
FURB - Blumenau
(047) 3321-0660


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Re: Zend Server Community Edition

> Does anyone here have any opinion about Zend Server Community Edition?
>=20
> I'm doing some tests here and I'm intending to use it at the University=
=20
> Library where I work.
>=20
> Any input about this web application would be nice.

I recently looked at changing to Zend CE for my development machine. The
reason being, Zend no longer provide their Debugger tool for PHP 5.3
Thread Safe builds.
After looking into it and some deliberation I decided learning to use a
new debugger (Xdebug) and sticking with PHP/Apache compiled as the
developers designed them, with support from those same developers as the
build is standard; was preferable to getting the debugger and learning a
new configuration of the stack, and only having support from the third
party (Zend) as the build is now non-standard.



> TIA,
>=20
> --=20
> Marcos R. Cardoso
> Seção de Documentação e Automação
> Biblioteca Universit=E1ria
> FURB - Blumenau
> (047) 3321-0660
>=20
>=20
> --=20
> PHP Windows Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
>=20

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Niel Archer



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Re: Zend Server Community Edition

hi,

A little notice about ZS in general, "community" or not:

- it has nothing to do with php.net
- we don't support it (don't report bugs to bugs.php.net using it)

I'm not saying it is bad or good, only stating some facts.

Cheers,

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Niel Archer wrote:
>> Does anyone here have any opinion about Zend Server Community Edition?
>>
>> I'm doing some tests here and I'm intending to use it at the University
>> Library where I work.
>>
>> Any input about this web application would be nice.
>
> I recently looked at changing to Zend CE for my development machine. The
> reason being, Zend no longer provide their Debugger tool for PHP 5.3
> Thread Safe builds.
> After looking into it and some deliberation I decided learning to use a
> new debugger (Xdebug) and sticking with PHP/Apache compiled as the
> developers designed them, with support from those same developers as the
> build is standard; =A0was preferable to getting the debugger and learning=
a
> new configuration of the stack, and only having support from the third
> party (Zend) as the build is now non-standard.
>
>
>
>> TIA,
>>
>> --
>> Marcos R. Cardoso
>> Seção de Documentação e Automação
>> Biblioteca Universit=E1ria
>> FURB - Blumenau
>> (047) 3321-0660
>>
>>
>> --
>> PHP Windows Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
>> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
>>
>
> --
> Niel Archer
>
>
>
> --
> PHP Windows Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
>
>



--=20
Pierre

http://blog.thepimp.net | http://www.libgd.org

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Re: Zend Server Community Edition

Hi!

> A little notice about ZS in general, "community" or not:
>
> - it has nothing to do with php.net
> - we don't support it (don't report bugs to bugs.php.net using it)

I think it's a little overreaching. It has a lot to do with php.net -
it's the same code, only compiled. And I don't think it makes any sense
to refuse handling bugs in builds other than php.net build - we never
did it and that never was a policy of bugs.php.net. So if there's a bug
in PHP which manifests in ZS build (of course, without Zend extensions
etc.) then it should be reported to bugs.php.net as bugs in all other
builds do, and please do report it.
--
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com

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Re: Zend Server Community Edition

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 8:23 PM, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> A little notice about ZS in general, "community" or not:
>>
>> - it has nothing to do with php.net
>> - we don't support it (don't report bugs to bugs.php.net using it)
>
> I think it's a little overreaching. It has a lot to do with php.net - it's
> the same code, only compiled.

It is not as far as I can see and it does not use the same libs either
on windows.

> And I don't think it makes any sense to refuse
> handling bugs in builds other than php.net build - we never did it and that
> never was a policy of bugs.php.net.

We always did.

Cheers,
--
Pierre

http://blog.thepimp.net | http://www.libgd.org

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Re: Zend Server Community Edition

I am very biased (full disc., I'm the technical PM of Zend Server) but
let me try to answer some of this, and maybe some of the concerns that
have been raised in this thread (and in other places). I'm trying to be
as transparent as possible, maybe this will help you decide whether or
not ZSCE is for you.

Zend Server CE provides a stable and well preforming PHP setup on
Windows. You can get that setup through other means of course, but this
is our focus for Zend Server.

I'd also say that up until now we are mostly focused on providing a
production stack. Hence the opcode cache, FastCGI setup, etc.

As for Oracle support, we bundle the Oracle client libraries (lite
version actually) and compile oci8 and PDO_OCI against the 11g libraries
to support the new DRCP feature.

As for compatibility and non-standard build, this might imply several
things and I can only guess what specific issues people are referring
to, but if I'm guessing right, there are two differences between how we
build PHP and the php.net binaries:

* Usage of VC8 vs. VC9 or VC6 - Zend has been building on Windows with
VC8 for a couple of years now (since Zend Core). This makes our PHP
builds somewhat incompatible with VC6 built extension DLLs for PHP 5.2
(we know they mostly work, but there's definitely a difference), and
completely incompatible with VC6 or VC9 builds on PHP 5.3 (because PHP
simply won't load them).

We are in the process of moving all our build system to use VC9 (yes,
that's official) and in fact the PHP 5.3 builds of Zend Server 5.0 beta
(not yet available in CE) are already on VC9. Eventually we will ship
all our 5.3 builds on VC9.

My note on this would be that if you need some custom extension which
is not shipped by Zend Server, check first if it works or not - if
you'll be using 5.3 than you'll have to wait for us to release VC9 based
builds. If you have everything you need shipped with Zend Server, then I
don't think there's real concern there - except for being able to report
bugs to bugs.php.net which I will not get into, as I am not really a
core developer and have no say here. Of course, if you report these bugs
to Zend we will take them seriously :)

* Zend does apply some patches to PHP which are not a part of official
php.net releases. Those fall under two categories:

1. Patches already in the php.net SVN tree, but not released yet. We
do this when we encounter some major bug or security issue in PHP and
decide it's important enough for us to patch it in our own product. This
is done very selectively and in any case the only patches applied are
already in the PHP source tree - we simply backport them.

2. Patches that provide Zend Server specific functionality, such as
fixes that help our own specific FastCGI infrastructure to work better.
This is done in a very local and minimal manner, and shouldn't affect
the behavior of your own PHP code.

Again, I think the only concern here for you as an end user (and not a
core PHP developer) is the fact that bugs reported through bugs.php.net
might not be accepted. Again, I have no say to whether this is right or
wrong, I am not a core developer and can't judge. As I said you can
always report these bugs to Zend, we can triage and figure out if it's a
PHP bug or a Zend induced bug, and fix accordingly (and push to php.net
if relevant).


Ok, I think I have said enough :) I'll be happy to answer more
questions, on or off the list.

Best regards,

Shahar.

Marcos R. Cardoso wrote:
> Does anyone here have any opinion about Zend Server Community Edition?
>
> I'm doing some tests here and I'm intending to use it at the University
> Library where I work.
>
> Any input about this web application would be nice.
>
> TIA,
>

--
Shahar Evron

Product Manager
Zend Technologies

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Re: Re: Zend Server Community Edition

hi,

The only fact that you build 5.2 with VC8 means that you apply patches
not present in php 5.2 (eventually in 5.3).

About moving to VC9 for 5.3, given that we have moved to VC9 and
everything is going well so far, that sounds like a logical move.

But why would you provide your own binaries with random patches (not a
judgement, only a statement) instead of using PHP binaries? Security?
We do security releases when a librarie is affected. PHP itself has
regular security releases as well. For example, Microsoft uses
php.net's binaries for the Web Platform Installer
(http://www.microsoft.com/web/).

Other comments inline,

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 5:51 PM, Shahar Evron wrote:

> =A02. Patches that provide Zend Server specific functionality, such as
> fixes that help our own specific FastCGI infrastructure to work better.
> This is done in a very local and minimal manner, and shouldn't affect
> the behavior of your own PHP code.

Your own FastCGI to work better than what?


> Again, I think the only concern here for you as an end user (and not a
> core PHP developer) is the fact that bugs reported through bugs.php.net
> might not be accepted. Again, I have no say to whether this is right or
> wrong, I am not a core developer and can't judge. As I said you can
> always report these bugs to Zend, we can triage and figure out if it's a
> PHP bug or a Zend induced bug, and fix accordingly (and push to php.net
> if relevant).

As being both my concerns are to actually see a kind of fork of PHP,
being presented as the only usable binary distributions for windows
and other platforms (and for apache too).

As with any distributors who apply custom patches, we do not support
them. However these distributors usually have an issues tracker and
ask their users to report issues there. If they meet a real php bug,
it is then then reported in our tracker. That's common practice. We
will indeed not reject obvious bugs only because the users use ZS.

Cheers,
--=20
Pierre

http://blog.thepimp.net | http://www.libgd.org

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Re: Re: Zend Server Community Edition

Hi!

> As being both my concerns are to actually see a kind of fork of PHP,
> being presented as the only usable binary distributions for windows
> and other platforms (and for apache too).

There's no any "fork" and nobody ever presented it as "the only usable
binary distributions for windows".
Applying patches between releases is how most of binary distros always
worked (provided there are patches important for their clients which are
not released yet) with a lot of opensource projects - incl. Redhat, etc.
- and nobody ever thought of talking about "forking" anything.
--
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com

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Re: Re: Zend Server Community Edition

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 8:46 PM, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:

> There's no any "fork" and nobody ever presented it as "the only usable
> binary distributions for windows".
> Applying patches between releases is how most of binary distros always
> worked (provided there are patches important for their clients which are not
> released yet) with a lot of opensource projects - incl. Redhat, etc. - and
> nobody ever thought of talking about "forking" anything.

Call it a spoon if you prefer :)

Btw, that's why I used "a kinf of fork" as I'm not sure about the
other patches not fitting in the backporting category.

Cheers,
--
Pierre

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Re: Re: Zend Server Community Edition

Hi,

Pierre Joye wrote:
> hi,
>
> The only fact that you build 5.2 with VC8 means that you apply patches
> not present in php 5.2 (eventually in 5.3).

Yes, that's true. I include those in the 2nd category of patches we
apply. They should have no effect on any user code.

I am specifically trying to focus on real pros and cons of Zend Server
for the end user, not for someone who's a core developer. These patches
99.9% of the time have either no effect on the user's code, or, if they
do, it's for the better because it is some bug fix.

> But why would you provide your own binaries with random patches (not a
> judgement, only a statement) instead of using PHP binaries? Security?
> We do security releases when a librarie is affected. PHP itself has
> regular security releases as well. For example, Microsoft uses
> php.net's binaries for the Web Platform Installer
> (http://www.microsoft.com/web/).

First, they are not random. Usually they are very specific hand picked
patches that we decide are important enough for our own customers.
There's nothing random about it.

BTW in most cases these patches are created by Zend employees who fix a
bug in PHP specifically because it is important to our customers, commit
it, and we then provide an update.

Now as for the "why" question, A part of Zend's business is to provide a
binary distibution of PHP which is supported and updated by Zend. We
need to control patches that go in, libraries that we compile against
etc. - exactly because while PHP releases do include critical fixes,
sometimes our own customers need a fix that PHP developers do not
consider important enough to release (not criticizing, different users
have different needs). It happens on almost every release of Zend
Server. This is exactly what our customers pay us for.

In reality I think that this practice is not very different from how
Linux distributions might patch and release some software before there's
an upstream release. It happens all the time (and again, this is why
some people choose to pay RHEL or Ubuntu).

In fact, they do that for PHP as well - so I am not sure why this is so
different.

> As being both my concerns are to actually see a kind of fork of PHP,
> being presented as the only usable binary distributions for windows
> and other platforms (and for apache too).

We do not present it as such (see first paragraph of my first email in
this thread - I specifically say the same setup can be achieved in other
ways). We do think it's better than some setups, it would be silly of us
not to take pride in what we do - but I don't think we've said it's the
only usable way to use PHP on Windows. If you encountered someone from
Zend saying that I'd like to know, so I can correct them.

Most importantly, it is *not* a fork of PHP. PHP is open source, vendors
are free to build binary distributions of it. We have no intentions to
start taking development in a different direction. Again, I think it is
like saying Debian forks PHP, or most other software they ship. It's
just wrong.

Actually, forking PHP makes absolutely no business sense for Zend as a
company. Seriously, think about it. More work for us, less value to our
users, more compatibility headaches - we are trying to minimize those,
not the opposite.

> As with any distributors who apply custom patches, we do not support
> them. However these distributors usually have an issues tracker and
> ask their users to report issues there. If they meet a real php bug,
> it is then then reported in our tracker. That's common practice. We
> will indeed not reject obvious bugs only because the users use ZS.

We have a ticketing system and forums, and we have in house developers
who can take a bug reported to Zend and work to either fix it or
properly report it in bugs.php.net.

Do you think an open bug tracker for ZS would make a big difference for
your work?

Thanks,

Shahar.

--
Shahar Evron

Product Manager
Zend Technologies

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Re: Re: Zend Server Community Edition

Hi,

Pierre Joye wrote:

> Random has no bad or good meaning here. You apply patches that
> upstream (php.net) does not apply, for a given branch.

Yes, but they are not random... There is a very clear process by which
we choose them - and it is not by closing our eyes and pointing a finger ;)

> Are the windows sources available somewhere? For the libs and php?

Currently, only the Linux sources are available (through the src deb/rpm
package). We plan to make the Windows sources available too - I can't
put a time frame on it yet but it will happen.

>> We have a ticketing system and forums, and we have in house developers
>> who can take a bug reported to Zend and work to either fix it or
>> properly report it in bugs.php.net.
>>
>> Do you think an open bug tracker for ZS would make a big difference for
>> your work?
>
> Not really as long as you report issues to us. But I did not see that
> happen in the past for windows (one example, the mssql library bug was
> updated in ZS but no report in bugs.php.net about the actual issue).

Ok, I just want to make it clear that while it's possible we failed to
properly report some things (I am honestly not involved in every bug,
far from it - so I can't comment about this specific issue) it is not
our intention or evil plan to "hide" bugs from php.net. Again, this is
not something we'd benefit from. If it happened it was due to a mistake
and not because of some policy.

> It is also time for a little clarification. I have nothing against ZS
> in general. However I do have issues with the marketing behind it as
> it creates confusions while not improving php itself. Marketing is
> just fine as long as it stays outside php.net, but as this discussion
> happens on our lists, I had to reply. Even if we disagree on a couple
> of things, I think we made our points and the readers can now make
> their choices with all the necessary info.

I understand and respect that. I think the original poster of the thread
asked an honest question and I felt that I had to give Zend's
perspective - I don't think that in my original response there was any
"marketing". I tried to be as balanced and as transparent as possible.

I agree that I've made my point, so unless specific questions come up I
will now shut up :)

With best regards,

Shahar.

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Product Manager
Zend Technologies

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