Zend tries to put more PHP into the workplace

July 2, 2007 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

picture-2.pngZend, a company that supports web development in the PHP open-source programming language for large organizations, is launching a framework of developer tools to help businesses build web services faster.

It’s trying to make PHP as powerful as Java or .NET and as quick and easy as Ruby on Rails.

While Java or .NET power much of the existing “enterprise” web, they are both hard to use and time-consuming in many circumstance, even for many professionals. Zend’s premise is that companies are still figuring out how to grow their businesses online — and PHP is already used by over 20 million domains (graph via), making it the single most popular language for developing web software. Therefore, Zend hopes, large numbers of developers at potential client companies will have experience with the language and will see the company’s offerings as the obvious choice for how to do their next project.

picture-1.pngThere is no doubt money to be had in serving large, paying customers, but the growth of PHP as a programming language of choice for developers appears to have plateaued. At one point a couple years back there were actually more domains in PHP than there are now. It is true that businesses need to cobble applications together on the fly without sacrificing performance when lots of users get on — the sort of usage for which PHP was first developed. But will this be enough keep Zend relevant a few years from now, even for the “enterprise?”

Zend’s business model resembles MySQL, Red Hat and Ubuntu, companies that have built large businesses charging for services that support back-end open source technology. It certifies open source contributions to PHP, offers support, services and training as well as premium services including a development platform and a PHP application server. The company has also worked to put itself at the center of the PHP community by building out a set of best practices for developing with the language. It has developer relationships with Google, Microsoft, IBM and other large technology companies. It claims to have over 20,000 customers, from individual developers to big corporations — what really sets it apart from other PHP frameworks such as Cake and Prado.

The framework includes ways for a company’s developers to create mash-ups that use Google, Amazon and Yahoo API’s for their own company’s applications. Zend plans to further tap into open information on the web within the next several months. It is developing a plugin for the OpenID identity system, so that users can log in through a participating site’s regular registration using an identity that’s shared across the web.

While the company won’t tell us how much its making, co-founder and co-CTO Andi Gutman did say that revenue has been doubling every year since 2003 and is now in the “double-digit” millions, with clients increasingly coming through its big-name partners. He says most money is coming from North America and Europe, with a sizable market in Japan.

An example client is Right Media, an online advertising brokerage service that was purchased by Yahoo in April. It used Zend’s framework to build a way for clients to submit ads and track them over the web.

The framework is a credible PHP rival to hip, newer dynamic languages like Ruby on Rails — as far as enterprise business goes. The latter language has seen widespread adoption among startups in recent years as an even faster, easier way to get a product out of the door; the graph above shows that PHP hit its heyday in 2005 — now the web is getting bigger but the number of PHP domains aren’t increasing. But PHP, unlike Ruby on Rails, has proven to perform fast for sites of all sizes around the web (for example, Facebook was built from the ground up on it, although that site now includes a plethora of code in other languages).

And, using PHP in addition to Java can cause additional headaches at IT firms, which as this observer noted, now need two sets of skills.

Developers refer to PHP code as “spaghetti” — there’s lots of it, its ugly and poorly organized. PHP5 is also not backwards compatible with the previous version, PHP 4.

Zend notes itself as the only company built around a programming language. It would be interesting to see 37 Signals, which developed Rails while working on Basecamp and other business-focused software, try to take a page from Zend and become a central resource for lucrative larger enterprises. That would involve solving its performance problem on larger sites.

We don’t intend to step into the the holy wars that some developers wage over programming languages. Instead, do a Google search for php object model sucks and php object model rules for more.

Zend has received investment from a long list of venture capital firms (and leading software companies), including Azure Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, Platinum Neurone Ventures, SAP Ventures and Walden Israel Venture Capital. Its board of directors includes Marc Andreessen.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Roy
    Great post Eric. As a PHP development firm, we have been waiting for this day for a long time. The release of the framework and Zend's continued commitment to make PHP a viable option in the enterprise is a blessing for the commercial service providers in the PHP community.

    Roy
    www.varien.com
    www.magentocommerce.com
  • Just some clarifications in regards to your second sentence: PHP is a Web-specialized development technology, and as such it already has for a long time been at least peer, and in many ways superior, to Java and .NET (which are generic technologies trying to cover most of the modern software development needs).

    And as for Ruby on Rails, it is a framework quite different in focus than either PHP or Zend Framework. RoR is oriented towards quick development of simple CRUD (create, read, update, delete) Web applications, while ZF introduces a number of more generic tools that have been lacking in the PHP's standard library, especially in terms of object-oriented programming (PHP supports both procedural and OO style of programming).

    I'm always disturbed by the simplified comparisons of apples and oranges which are often used by media when it comes to programming technologies, especially in regards to Web development. It's not really fair to compare these things, because it's like comparing planes, ships and cars: all those things will take you to a destination, but each will have a different set of advantages in different situations.

    Or, as has been put a long ago, there's no silver bullet.
  • Berislav, Zend's framework clearly adopts the MVC method used by Ruby on Rails and other dynamic languages in order to simplify the development process on PHP. Because the point of the article is to consider the business potential of the framework, I think a high-level comparison between various languages is relevant.

    But I appreciate what you're saying... I decided to cut out a significant part of the article that went into more detail on the pros and cons of PHP. I didn't think enough readers would want to hear about it here.

    Berislav and everyone: is that right, or do you want more technical discussion/detail in these articles?
  • Nice post, nice graph.

    But, PHP 5 not compatible with PHP 4? That's note quite right. I ported an app from PHP 4 to PHP 5 and about the only thing I had to change was some capitalization in some reflection I was doing. But then, I shouldn't have been doing reflection anyway. I've had to do more changes moving from MySQL 3 to 4, or .NET 2 to 3. Or much worse, IE 6 to 7 ;)
  • MVC frameworks will take PHP much further than it has already come. Our team in India is now developing on the CodeIgniter framework (which is compatible with PHP4) and quite snappy. The idea behind frameworks allow a level of consistency in coding practice (whether you're using RoR or PHP) so that reading through spaghetti code is no longer a concern.
  • For my part, I'm quite fine with technical details being left out from articels on VentureBeat; however, especially because most of the audience here has limited technical knowledge, overly simplified conclusions and comparisons should be avoided. People tend to think in comparative terms, that's normal, but IMO it could easily be dangerous.

    The bottom line is that decisions about which technology to use should not be based on simplified comparisons, not even on a single expert's opinion (as developers, like all people, tend to have personal favorites), but instead one should look into the problem being solved, review all the options and then base the decision on the quality of solution in that context, as well as the availability of resources.
  • Steve
    Any tool or firm for Perl like Zend for PHP? Thanks.
  • Tom
    Steve - mod_perl or FastCGI for Perl will give you better performance than Zend for PHP.
  • Matt
    @Tom

    If you want performance use Java or C++, if you want to build websites use PHP or Python. If you want to process text files, use AWK or Perl (AWK is faster).