Zend Background Paper

Zend Technologies
Library Zend Whitepaper PHP

An overview on PHP
Author: Zend Technologies Inc.

Content Page showed great similarities to Perl, while attempting to be much

1 Management Summary 1 simpler to use. More than two years later, Rasmus Lerdorf published
2 Introduction 1 a more advanced version of the increasingly popular software
3 Overview 1 called PHP 2.0 (or PHP/FI 2).
a. The History of PHP 1
b. PHP today? 2 Zend
Framework
c. The people behind PHP 2 IBM, Oracle and Zend
Eclipse IDE
PHP 5.0 Endorse
d. The PHP market 2 • XML, PHP
SOAP,
e. What analysts and press say about PHP 3 Yahoo!
OOP
20M
Standardizes
4 Enterprise adoption of PHP 3 on PHP
PHP 4
a. A mature, proven and performing platform 3 1M Internet
domains Released
15M
b. Platform and vendor independence 3 • Zend Engine
• Zend Founded
Zeev Suraski,
c. Supported by leading players in the market 3 Andi Gutmans
develop
10M
Rasmus
5 The future of PHP 4 Lerdorf PHP 3
Intoduces
PHP/FI
PHP 5M
Internet
1. Management Summary Domains

PHP is at the forefront of Web 2.0 and Service Oriented Architectures 1995 1997 1999 2000 2002 2004 2005 2006
enabler technologies along with other open source projects MySQL, PHP — a success story
Apache or JBoss. With ten years of development behind it, PHP
is a relatively young programming language. Nevertheless, millions In 1997, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans began a complete re-
of developers world-wide use PHP to develop systems that power write of PHP to make the language more powerful for eCommerce
over 20 million websites. PHP is endorsed not only by its large applications. They co-operated with Rasmus Lerdorf and changed
open source community, but also by leading players and analysts the meaning of PHP to “PHP: Hypertext Preproces-sor”.2 Their
in the IT market such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft. PHP is ideal efforts resulted in PHP 3.0 and were published in June of 1998.
for Enterprise applications as it is easy to learn yet robust and This collaboration gave PHP strong extensibility features that made
flexible enough to power business critical applications. it very easy to write additions and extensions for the language.
At this point, initial buds of object orientation were integrated
2. Introduction in the language’s syntax.
PHP is an important player in the software development market.
Its popularity with both private software developers and corporate The dramatic growth of the WWW in the late 90s, created an
IT departments is having a growing impact on the market for enormous demand for scripting languages for dynamic website
commercial software as well. While PHP is heavily used in the development. With the release of PHP 3, the Internet community
development of web based software, it is not limited to this field. found a tool that was easier to learn and handle than Perl (the
It is also used quite frequently to tie together different existing de-facto standard at the time) and PHP rapidly became the language
applications or application modules. Such is the case with Yahoo of choice for dynamic content. By the end of 1998, the install
that uses PHP to "glue" together code written in different languages. base for PHP reached several hundred thousand websites.
The purpose of this paper is to summarize the history of PHP and
offer an overview of its current status and market. We will then During the next two years, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans,
highlight the advantages of adopting PHP at the Enterprise level developed PHP 4. When it was published in May 2000, the main
and how programmers and IT managers can benefit. Finally, we new features included simple object orientation and session
will give an outlook on the future development of PHP. handling capabilities. To increase the performance and stability
of PHP execution on the server, the Zend Engine 1 was introduced
3. Overview as the heart of PHP installation. In May 2000, the number of
a. The History of PHP domains that use PHP reached 2 million3.
The development of PHP started in 1995: Rasmus Lerdorf created
a personal collection of Perl1 scripts and transferred them into a
package written in C. This package was called Personal Home Page
tools, or PHP for short. On June 8th, 1995 this package was
published as PHP/FI, where FI stood for Form Interpreter. PHP/FI

1 Pearl is a scripting language that originated in 1987. See http://www.perl.org/ for more details.
2 This is a recursive acronym, comparable to GNU (GNU is not Unix)
3 All domain and server figures are from PHP.net/Netcraft if not noted otherwise.
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 Zend Background Paper

Zend Whitepaper PHP

The PHP community, with the strong participation of Zeev Suraski Another benefit of PHP is flexibility. Since no compilation is
and Andi Gutmans spent the next four years creating PHP 5. This needed, it is easy to make changes or bug fixes within minutes
long development cycle was mainly due to a very extensive testing and to deploy new versions of the program frequently. Additionally,
phase. When PHP 5 was finally released in the summer of 2004, it is easy to prototype new applications and concepts; typically
together with the Zend Engine 2 it introduced major enhancements: compared to C or Java , PHP application development takes 50%
such as full support for object orientation, XML4 integration, and of the time.
the SOAP5 protocol. By the summer of 2004, PHP had grown to
an install base of more than 16 million domains. Whilst PHP5 includes SQLite database as a standard install for
The transition from PHP 4 usage to PHP 5 was slow in the beginning, rapid prototyping, PHP applications usually store their data in
however this changed with the release of PHP 5.1 in late 2005. external databases, such as MySQL, Oracle or IBM DB2. PHP5
In addition to smaller enhancements, PHP 5.1 brought a database incorporates a database abstraction layer "PDO" for developing
abstraction layer called PDO6. PDO makes it much easier to use applications that support multiple databases.
PHP with various databases from different vendors. By the end
of 2005, PHP adoption soared to more than 23 million domains. As PDO currently supports most of the commercial databases on
the market and is part of an open source project, other drivers
b. PHP today can be easily added as new technologies emerge.
Today, PHP is a full featured comprehensive programming language
with solid object orientation support. While it was called a Since PHP is an open source language, all information on how
scripting language in the past, today it is more referred to as a the language works, its syntax and the inner functions of the
dynamic programming language. Unlike traditional programming Zend Engine are publicly available and can be used free of charge
languages such as C/C++, PHP does not have to be compiled. under the PHP license. This is a BSD-style license, there are no
Instead the source code is interpreted at runtime. licensing fees related to using PHP or the Zend Engine in
applications whether commercial or otherwise and there are no
The Zend Engine acts as a runtime interpreter that compiles the limitations on commercial use as there are with other open source
code in real time. projects released under the GPL license.

The Zend Engine — the heart of PHP c. The people behind PHP
The development of PHP is driven by the PHP Group, a community
Web Server Software
of developers that contribute to the various parts and modules
Database Modules of PHP. The PHP Group is also the official licenser of PHP. It is
My SQL Oracle ODB C XML IMAP LDAP Java COM More
... hard to give an exact number of how many people work on PHP,
Modules
since literally anyone can contribute to the project. It is easier
Zend Engine to make a rough distinction between the people working on the
Browser Web Server
FUNCTION MODULES INTERFACE core language and the Zend Engine and the larger number of
1 WEB 2 Disk
SERVER
INTERFACE EXECUTOR RUN-TIME people working on individual PHP extensions and libraries.
COMPILER
6 5 4 3 There are also several companies, whose staff contributes to the
development of PHP. Among those involved, Zend Technologies
founded by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, Yahoo, ezSystems,
Zend Engine
OmniTI and others.

Historically, interpreted languages suffered from lower perfor- d. The PHP market
mance (as compared with compiled languages). The PHP com- PHP ranks among the most popular programming languages today
munity has worked hard to overcome these issues, and today, and since 2004 is the undisputed leader in the web programming
it is possible for properly configured interpreted languages to market. According to a recent survey from Nexen.net, PHP has
approach execution speeds of compiled languages. a market share of more than 30 percent7. The number of internet
sites using PHP is around 20 million. However, this figure does
One of the major advantages PHP offers is platform independence. not take into consideration the growing number of internal
Currently, the list of supported operating systems includes Linux corporate servers used for intranet applications or development
(for various CPU architectures), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, purposes - statistics about this usage is still unclear. There are
Sun's Solaris (SPARC and Intel), IBM AIX, HP-UX, FreeBSD, Novell more than 15.000 worldwide users of Zend Technologies'
Netware, SGI IRIX, IBM AS/400, OS/2 and RISC OS. Since the Zend commercial products.
Engine is open source, it is straightfoward to compile it for
additional operating systems. It is no surprise that there are The total number of professional software developers worldwide
adaptations for all common UNIX versions, as well as for exotic is estimated to be about seven million. According to a recent
environments like Amiga or BeOS. Platform independence has a survey of the popular UK-based IT news site, The Register, it is
second facet: most PHP applications can therefore be used on estimated that more than 2.5 million of them have experience
every computer or internet capable device. with PHP programming. More and more universities are taking into
account PHP’s growing role and their syllabi offer relevant courses.
4 Extensible Markup Language
In the summer of 2004 Zend Technologies established a certification
5 Simple Object Acces Protocol program together with Pearson-VUE. More than 1,000 PHP developers
6 PHP Data Objects
7 Source: http://www.nexen.net/chiffres_cles/phpversion/php_statistics_for_june_2006.php have become Zend Certified Engineers (ZCE) since then.
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 Zend Background Paper

Zend Whitepaper PHP

PHP’s penetration and market shares differ from region to region. any first person shooters or video editing applications made with
Since the basic combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP PHP anytime soon.
(without additional commercial tools) provides an almost enterprise
grade application platform without any licensing costs, PHP's But for many computing purposes, the pure application perfor-
market share is very high in developing countries. The Ukraine mance is of secondary interest and issues such as code maintaina-
and Sao Tomé for example lead the list of countries with the bility, portability, availability of skilled developers and total cost
highest market share for PHP with 69.7 and 68.2 percent of ownership are the main drivers of the business case to use PHP.
respectively8. In the leading industrial nations, USA, Germany
and Japan hold largest PHP markets, followed by France, UK, For example, PHP is often used in SOAs, where a large number
Canada, Italy and The Netherlands. of applications and modules work together and communicate
with each other over an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)13. Here the
There are a vast number of PHP programs available. A considerable speed of the individual modules is not as important because they
part of them deal with dynamic website content management(CMS9 often have to wait on Input from either the user or other appli-
) such as Typo3, ezPublish, Drupal and Joomla, eCommerce cations. PHP is also very often used for content-related applications
systems like Oxidesales, OS Commerce and Zen Cart, blog software like web shops or CMS; here speed of the application (or better:
like Wordpress, Serendipity, WIKIS like Tiki, Mediawiki (Wikipedia) the speed experience of the user) is often limited by the network
or discussion forum applications like phpBB, vBulletin and connection and its bandwidth. Since PHP can be used in tight
FUDforum. integration with databases and also Java, a popular practice is
to use PHP for modelling the application in terms of processes
e. What analysts and press say about PHP and business logic, but shift the major part of heavy transactional
Forrester Research evaluated 13 leading open source software work into modules written in Java or into the database level. For
projects using approximately 40 criteria and found that six of the additional performance, it is also possible to write C code PHP
projects stand out as examples of excellence and are ready for extensions for specific tasks.
corporate use10. PHP was the only dynamic programming language
in this group and stood beside MySQL, Eclipse, Apache HTTP When talking about performance in conjunction with PHP, one
Server, Apache Tomcat, and the JBoss Application Server. US should not only consider the processing speed but rather factors
magazine eWeek attested that the LAMP-stack (and PHP in like scalability or the ability to cache content. With PHP and a
particular) gives excellent performance compared with commercial number of open source and commercial tools, it is possible to
alternatives like Microsoft’s. Net: “This stack's performance create web-applications that can handle several thousand
numbers suggest what many who have been using PHP for some simultaneous requests.
time now (including some of the busiest blogs on the Web) know
to be true — that a pure LAMP-based PHP system can easily handle b. Platform and vendor independence
enterprise-class traffic and loads.”11 Another important factor for enterprises to consider is PHP’s
platform and vendor independence. Due to negative experiences,
4. Enterprise adoption of PHP many customers seek to avoid vendor-lock-in or platform-lock-
Like many open source technologies, PHP was initially popular in situations. As described above, PHP is developed by an inde-
for non-commercial purposes. However, over the past 5 years, pendent group of developers that are not affiliated with one
more and more companies have begun using PHP, mostly for their specific company. In addition, PHP is free and open source and
websites or web shops. Today, with the move towards SOA1212 it runs on virtually any software platform.
and Web services, PHP, with its robust XML capabilities and native
Web services handling is a popular solution for internal and The value is obvious: Companies can use PHP in almost every
mission-critical applications. Even though some corporations can system environment without licensing costs. They can also move
be reluctant to use open source new technologies for business their PHP applications from one system platform to another
critical applications and tend to trust their established vendors, without large modifications and again without licensing costs.
several legitimate arguments illustrate, that PHP is a viable They can even use entry-level freeware development tools.
technology alternative for the enterprise sector.
The low (or better no) entry costs make it very attractive especially
a. A mature, proven and performing platform for smaller companies to start their first experiences with PHP.
With more than ten years of constant development, PHP is no They can prototype everything for free on a LAMP system, e.g.
longer a newcomer. Millions of developers world-wide use PHP on an old server or even a PC. As their PHP application becomes
full time to develop systems for over 20 million websites and more sophisticated, they can scale move it to a more professional
applications. Whenever a new version of the language and its environment and can invest in additional commercial tools for
core components is published, it goes through a rigid public beta developing, deployment and management.
testing especially at commercial vendors like Zend. In addition,
Zend provides enterprise-grade official support programs for PHP.

One of the main issues discussed regarding PHP is how it performs 8 Source:
http://www.nexen.net/chiffres_cles/phpversion/php_statistics_for_june_2006.php#adoption
compared to other programming platforms, Due to the nature of 9 Content Management System
a non-compiled language; PHP will never be as fast as compiled 10 Source: “The Forrester Wave Project Summary, Q2 2006”.
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,36338,00.html
applications that are tuned for a specific com-bination of operating 11 Source: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1983364,00.asp
12 Service Oriented Architecture
system and hardware. It is therefore unlikely that we will see 13 Enterprise Service Bus
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 Zend Background Paper

Zend Whitepaper PHP

c. Supported by leading players in the market Past conceptions held that PHP was only capable of elementary
Even though more and more companies are trying to hedge against tasks such as guest books, simple Web sites etc. However PHP is
vendor or platform lock-ins, they still desire a technology that also increasingly used for other types of applications up to a certain
has the support and endorsement from large IT vendors. Since level of complexity. The important benefit of PHP is that it does
they often use enterprise applications from the large companies not go around the function range of an application, but rather
such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP, they want to ensure that around the complexity of the connections in application. Therefore
the offered technology is accepted, supported and coherent with large applications can also be written with PHP, as long as they
the rest of their technology strategy. For this reason Zend are divided into components. As this method of development is
Technologies has strategic technology cooperation with IBM, becoming more in demand by Ajax and SOA in the IT surrounding
Oracle and Microsoft to ensure that their customers can continue fields, PHP will consequently advance into additional domains. As
to leverage on their existing technology investments with PHP. a result, PHP goes hand in hand with the IT trends to divide large
applications into small services and is clearly in line with the
5. The future of PHP direction of IT management strategies in large enterprises.
In the past PHP open source principles have put greater overhead
on individual developer choices. Unlike Java, every developer had Bearing in mind the advantages of PHP and the technology evangelism
the possibility to do as they pleased since there was little language activities of Zend Technologies' it seems a logical consequence
and systems standardization. Over the past 18 months this gap has that PHP would receive a strong endorsement from the IT industry
been minimized by the introduction of a set of best practices and
standardizations and will continue this orientation in future with Zend cooperates with Sun Microsystems to optimize the PHP/Java
the growth of PHP frameworks such as Zend Framework. interoperability. By collaborating with IBM and Oracle, Zend has
created Zend CoreTM, stable and supported stacks of PHP and
Java database drivers desgined for their major databases. Intel and SAP
EAI, ERP, demonstrated their trust in the PHP market by investing into Zend
Data Technologies through their venture capital funds. Finally, Microsoft,
warehouse
Application

Complexity

realizes the potential of PHP and has announced a technical

Portal, collaboration to improve Interoperability of PHP on the Windows
CRM,
Workflow Server Platform.
CMS, Weblog,
Community,
e-business PHP will increase in importance in Enterprise environments while
Guestbook, keeping a leading position as an easy to use programming language
e-Mail form,
contact form for web applications.
PHP
Frequency of occurrence

Technology follows requirement

4

About Zend Technologies

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-two million Web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic
web applications. www.zend.com

ZEND: The holistic approach to PHP

• Application management and availability with Zend PlatformTM
• Development of PHP applications with Zend StudioTM, the leading development environment for PHP
• Certified and officially supported PHP installations with Zend CoreTM
• Access to expertise of leading PHP experts with Zend Professional ServicesTM
• Improved PHP knowledge through Zend TrainingTM offers
• Protection of intellectual property and source code and administration of licensing models with Zend GuardTM
• The certified and manufacturer-supported collection of PHP components and PHP libraries – Zend FrameworkTM
• First class 24/7 support via the Zend NetworkTM

Corporate Headquarters: Central Europe: International: © 2007 Zend Corporation.

Zend and Zend Platform are registered
Zend Technologies, Inc. Zend Technologies GmbH Zend Technologies, Ltd. trademarks of Zend Technologies, Ltd.
19200 Stevens Creek Blvd. Bayerstrasse 83 12 Abba Hillel Street All other trademarks are the property
www.zend.de Cupertino, CA 95014 80335 München, Deutschland Ramat Gan, Israel 52506 of their respective owners.
Tel: 1-888-PHP-ZEND Tel: +49-89-516199-0 Tel: 972-3-753-9500
0200-M-WP-0207-R1-EN
1-888-747-9363 Fax: +49-89-516199-20 Fax: 972-3-613-9501
Fax: 1-408-253-8801 E-Mail: info-germany@zend.com

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