July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

All that’s missing are the streamers, balloons, and cheesy Best Price Ev-ah signs. Because the price competition between Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Rackspace is heating up so fast, the cloud market could be a massive virtual used car lot.

Google announced today that it is reducing the cost of its Google App Engine storage from $0.24/GB/month to $0.18 per gigabyte. App Engine operations pricing is also going down: Google is dropping database writes from $0.10 to $0.09 per 100,000 operations and reads from $0.07 to $0.06.

Google App Engine is a relative newcomer to the cloud market, having just recently started to get serious about supporting non-Google-used languages such as PHP – the programming language that runs 75 percent of the web.

But it’s already in massive use, with 4.5 trillion monthly transactions at 99.95 percent uptime.

Google is in bitter competition with Amazon Web Services, which reduced prices by about 28 percent a month ago, and Microsoft’s Azure, which just entered full public availability but is already a billion-dollar business and also just reduced prices by 21 to 33 percent. Rackspace, also a big cloud competitor, recently chopped its prices as well.

This new price decrease appears to match those from Amazon and Microsoft. The challenge, however, when evaluating cloud costs from multiple providers is that each vendor calculates costs somewhat differently, so it’s hard to get an apples to apples comparison.

Google last cut prices in November 2012, also in an attempt to compete with Amazon. And the price war looks like it will continue for some time to come.

Essentially, it’s become fairly obvious that cloud is a commodity, and the cheapest provider will win. The question is, can companies maintain excellent service levels while cutting pricing to the bone.

photo credit: Hugo90 via photopin cc

PHP company Zend has just released the results of its annual developer survey. The exhaustive poll of 5,000 developers highlights a few interesting trends and one particularly heartening mobile web factoid.

Clearly, everyone and their dog is thinking mobile first these days. But what’s more interesting in the survey is that the majority of developers aren’t looking to iOS or Android to do so.

From a release on the report:

When asked how they intend to deliver content and services to their mobile audience, 79% of developers identified their intent to leverage web apps and open standards such as HTML5.

Of course, the devops trend marches onward with the increased need for efficiency in deployment. Zend’s results show 87 percent of developers experience delays in moving their app from development to production, and a full 90 percent have worked weekends, vacations, and holidays because of production emergencies.

Here are the results in a handy infographic form:

Image credit: Based on photo from ostill/Shutterstock

That means that yes, at some point you’ll be able to run your little WordPress-powered blog on the biggest server farms on the planet. But it also means that major companies will be able to use Google’s famously reliable services to run their enterprise-scale “big data,” backend, and, yes, consumer web projects, all in the PHP language that that is increasingly penetrating corporations.

I talked to one of the three founding fathers of PHP and current Zend CEO, Andi Gutmans, about the implications for PHP.

It’s a busy time for the Gutmans, the open-source programming language, and Zend, the company Gutmans formed to offer commercial support and tools for PHP. Engine Yard just recently added PHP to their Platform-as-a-Service as well. And Zend is expanding quickly in the enterprise as it has recently released integrated development tools for cloud-enabled mobile applications.

But Gutmans, though busy, is thoroughly upbeat.

And for good reason: The biggest web company on the planet just added support for the most widely used programming language on the planet. And in that support is a massive implied compliment to PHP — the first non-Google programming language to be supported by Google App Engine — and a potentially major boost to Zend’s business.

VentureBeat: Did Google talk to you before adding PHP to Google App Engine?

Source: John Koetsier

Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012.

Andi Gutmans: I don’t know how to answer that. I was aware that they were going to make that announcement … I’ve worked with the product manager on the project before.

VentureBeat: Google didn’t formally brief you?

Gutmans: Let’s put it this way: It’s not a surprise that a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) player that’s serious about gaining market share added PHP support. Google App Engine was almost a science project for the first few years, only supporting languages that Google used internally.

But in the past few months, there’s been a real attitude from Google that we’re going to go and compete with Amazon and with Microsoft, and we’re going to do it all fronts. They’ve become very aggressive on differentiating on performance and billing.

VentureBeat: What does this announcement say about PHP?

Gutmans: We have internal jokes about PHP’s web penetration and have used the stat that PHP runs 39 percent of the web because it was the only number we could get from Netcraft.

But I love Google’s stat, that 75 percent of the web runs PHP. No one knows the web better than Google.

If they’re trying to gain market share and gain it quickly, there’s no other language to do it with. And this is the first non-Google language they’re supporting.

VentureBeat: How’s that feel? And how are your customers reacting?

Gutmans: I’m definitely excited about it.

When any player does something like this — especially Google — it’s a huge validation. We got emails from some of our largest customers, saying this is great … it gives our enterprise customers a higher sense of confidence. And that stat that 75 percent of the web runs PHP is great for Zend – anything that is good for PHP, by proxy is good for Zend.

In addition, they said that PHP was their top-requested feature, which means the developer community was very supportive of us.

VentureBeat: Will you offer Google App Engine Support within Zend Studio, so developers can publish to Google right from within their Zend development environment?

Gutmans: We don’t know yet … it’s early and we’re exploring what kind of relationship we can have with Google.

We do support Google Compute Engine — that’s a full integration and some of the larger companies who run PHP already use it — but Google App Engine is just launched, it’s still in experimentation mode.

VentureBeat: What took Google so long to add PHP support?

Gutmans: I can’t speak for Google, but my assumption is that I felt that Google App Engine in the first few years was something they knew they wanted to do really well but … they kinda went down the simple easy route.

But we’ve seen a significant acceleration in the past 12 months. This will be a $20 billion market by 2016, and they moved from testing the waters to being very very aggressive right now.

We recently surveyed 5,000 PHP developers, asking them where in the cloud do you think you’ll deploy. Fifty-one percent said Amazon Web Services, but Google was 21 percent … and we just support Compute Engine right now.

It wasn’t even on the list last year, so that’s a big jump.

VentureBeat: What does this mean for the little guy building in PHP or hosting a WordPress blog?

Gutmans: I think it gives another option for the guys who do the small stuff, who are using shared hosting for $20/month.

What’s really great for the small developer is that it’s a nice value proposition — you can start at a lower cost. And, it’s a modern platform versus shared hosting, which is quite constrained.”

VentureBeat: So what does this mean for PHP overall?

 Gutmans: The number of requests that Google got from developers was very very significant. It exemplifies what we’ve been talking about … that PHP is very broadly adopted, but also by enterprise.

And that is driven by web, mobile, and cloud, which is where PHP’s sweet spot is. We’re seeing a strong tailwind behind us.

The free learn-programming-online site now has 11 modules and 86 lessons in all things PHP, from the basics and the standard if/else logic flow to arrays, functions, and advanced object-oriented programming.

“The future of programming is making a tool for people to demonstrate their creativity,” Codecademy founder and CEO Zach Sims told me a few months ago. “In 2013, we want to extend Codecademy’s reach and help people move beyond beginners.”

PHP is a good start, as the language is simple enough to let beginners get their feet wet while powerful enough to build world-class websites like Facebook. And with over five million PHP developers on the planet, new programmers would be joining perhaps the largest cohort of developers around, with plenty of code help, sample, code, and forums to help them progress beyond the basics.

And with Andi Gutmans and Co. at Zend focusing on bringing the power of PHP to blended mobile applications, PHP skills are helpful not only on the server but also in cloud-connected native app development.

PHP has been one of the most-requested languages for Codecademy to add to its coursework, Sims told me. Just three months ago, Codecademy launched API training with YouTube, NPR, Bit.ly, and six other partners. Now students have one more language, besides the already existing Javascript, HTML/CSS, Python, and Ruby to use them with.

Codecademy’s introduction to its PHP courses:

PHP is the world’s most popular server-side scripting language. Interested in processing form data from your website, creating HTML on the fly, handling cookies, or talking to a database? PHP’s got you covered.

Courses are created by the community. We’re launching PHP as a work-in-progress and we want you to help create the future of PHP instruction for people all over the world.

photo credit: CyberHades via photopin cc

While there are five million PHP developers around the globe, only some small fraction of them pay Zend for its server and IDE tools that make PHP sites faster, better, more debuggable, and more maintainable.

So Andi Gutmans, Zend CEO and one of the original fathers of the PHP programming language, is going freemium.

Zend Server version six, released yesterday, includes new features that automate deployment, make debugging much easier and faster — especially when bugs are a result of the inevitable differences between production, staging, and development environments — and proactive application monitoring tools that help developers and ops teams optimize running applications.

But the free version could really help propel Zend into a more prominent position in the average PHP developer’s toolkit.

Zend Server 6, free edition, helps developers who want advanced debugging and performance metrics in development states. It’ll help optimize server performance, run code traces for advanced debugging, and even assist in deploying your application to a live server. But of course, it is freemium, and has what Zend calls “limited production capabilities” and will only keep performance metrics for a short period of time.

Zend is, of course, hoping that the first-hit-is-always-free strategy will lead to more developers buying the whole stack to get all the goodies in production as well as development.

And there are some goodies:

“Within three days of our first site launch, Zend helped us optimize performance by more than 200 percent,” Robert Kerner, Chief Digital Officer of NYSE Euronext, said in a statement.

When I chatted to Zend’s Elaine Lennox and Andi Gutmans about the new version, they said the main goal of the new version was improving speed of deployment and maintenance of web apps.

“We’re helping app developers solve their problems,” Lennox said. “These days we see a very rapid release cycle … Facebook, for example, releases software multiple times per day, and more than half of enterprises are releasing several times a week.”

In those extremely rapid scenarios, teams don’t have time to waste finding bugs that need fixing. Lennox said that 70 percent of the time spending fixing bugs is actually spent just finding the problem, and that Zend 6′s new features would significantly reduce that waste.

“Whether you’re deploying in the cloud or on premise, a lot of the problems are the same,” Gutmans said. “So you want to have a very high level of automation.”

With the new software, developers can now write a script to deploy apps to production which ops staff can run, significantly cutting deployment time and problems. And they have “instant ability” to see the app’s behavior in the wild, get safe access to the production system in a read-only manner, and run code-tracing to see, line-by-line, what’s happening.

“It proactively monitors the application, and code tracing acts like a flight recorder, providing root-cause diagnostics so we can resolve issues quickly and definitively,” NYSE Euronext’s Kerner said. “In one example, Zend Server helped us resolve a problem related to SSL in our replicated environment that might otherwise have gone undetected.”

All of which sounds good, especially when some of it is available for free. One other bonus? The new environment is available, by default, through Amazon, Redhat, and other cloud service providers.

“There’s a lot of pressure in companies to deliver mobile, cloud-enabled apps,” Gutmans told me. “We’re getting used more and more by companies that traditionally used Java, and realized that Java just cannot perform this … we believe we have all the necessary components on the cloud and client side to help companies win.”

photo credit: pvera via photopin cc

They work hard and make good money — which got even better in 2012.

Source: Riviera Partners

Average salary by programming language

The average salary of a Silicon Valley developer jumped about $4,300 in 2012 to reach $118,900, a new study by Riviera Partners, a technical recruiting firm in the Bay Area says.

Database specialists brought home the most bacon, at $130,500, while lowly front-end developers wrangling CSS, Javascript, and some small remnants of HTML pulled in a relatively lowly $109,200.

Interestingly, when you break down the numbers by coding specialty, relatively out-of-favor Java developers make the most money, at $122,400. Developers in the popular but perhaps more accessible PHP programming language make $106,700, while devotees of relatively new languages Python and Ruby bring home $117,900 and $121,400, respectively.

So what else is new?

Not gender equality. Silicon Valley engineers are still overwhelming male, with 86 percent of developers prominently featuring a Y chromosome.

More details in the infographic below:

photo credit: Carsten Schertzer via photopin cc

These days, most companies are releasing software multiple times a week. In fact, according to Zend CMO Elaine Lennox, for “born-on-the-web” companies, this release cycle is several times a day. In that speedy environment, you don’t want to spend a lot of time bugfixing.

In, fact, you can’t afford to.

One of the most common source of problems is coordination between those who build and those who provision: development and operations. Different operating environments, lack of automation, and complex deployment procedures cause challenges between the two groups: 56 percent of teams have built apps that work just find in testing environments, but fail in production environments.

Source: John Koetsier

Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012

So Zend will be releasing a new version of its Zend Server and Zend Studio next week that, it says, will bridge the gap between development and operations. I chatted to Andi Gutmans, CEO and one of the original authors of the almost-ubiquitous PHP language, and Lennox yesterday.

“There’s a lot of pressure in companies to deliver mobile, cloud-enabled apps,” Gutmans says. “Half of teams are telling us that that they’ve missed dates because they cannot work together.”

Not working together causes bugs, and compounds the issues when bugs actually arise. According to Zend, 70 percent of the time for “fixing bugs” is actually spent in just finding the problem. Only 30 percent of developers’ time is spent solving it.

The new Zend Server 6 is designed to eliminate that 70 percent.

“The differences between development and live environments only get worse over time,” Lennox told me. “The development side doesn’t have visibility into errors in production, so the first step to fixing problems is to recreate the development environment from 3 months ago. We’ve seen teams literally waste weeks simply trying to reproduce issues.”

When that happens, people get upset. In numbers Lennox cited, 75 percent of developers say that operations is a “roadblock.” And, since one bad turn deserves another, 72 percent of operations engineers say that development is “not supportive of their goals.”

The fix?

Gutmans isn’t revealing just now what Zend is doing to solve the issue, except that Zend Server 6 will provide ”the tools, processes and infrastructure to enable teams to streamline and simplify their collaboration.”

More on that next week.

photo credit: e_monk via photopin cc

Yesterday, Zend announced that the new version of Zend Studio will lead to what Gutmans calls ‘cloud-connected mobile’ apps.

In the updated development environment, you can simultaneously create server-side code, integrate web services, communicate with legacy infrastructure … and design and build native mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, all in the same project.

I chatted with him today at ZendCon.

VentureBeat: How many years have you been working on PHP?

Andi Gutmans: Since 1997. I guess that’s about 15 years. Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I realized that, yes, I am actually older now.

VentureBeat: You’re now the CEO of Zend, of course. Do you still contribute any source code?

Gutmans: Not too much … not actively. My main contribution is that I still do review source code. We’re still the key maintainers of PHP to this day. So my only real engineering meeting is on the Zend engine.

VentureBeat: You’re one of the still fairly rare developers who became and is still his company’s CEO. Talk to me about that transition.

Source: John Koetsier

Zend Studio, creating a mobile app.

Gutmans: It actually happened about three and a half years ago, fairly recently. Originally, we [Gutmans and co-founder Zeev Suraski] had no aspirations to run the business. So we brought in a CEO.

When he left, I was the number two, and still had no aspirations, so we recruited another one. But then I moved to Silicon Valley. I became a more outgoing CTO and started meeting partners much more frequently. I basically transitioned to biz dev, and between 2004 and 2009, I was almost a member of the marketing team.

I won’t tell you what they used to call me!

It sort of happened naturally, between 2004 and 2009. I think it’s important to really understand where the market is — this is a very technically driven filed — and over time I built a business sense and become more effective at making deals.

Then in 2009 the board reached out to me and asked me to take the leadership role. It still wasn’t my plan, but they wanted a founder focus and a strong focus on product – we had started to do too much services. So what I’ve done over the past three years is move the company from 20 percent of revenue on runtime (software sales) to 70 percent today.

And we’re profitable today — it was a big step up for the company.

The one skill I benefited from from being an engineer was my Excel ability. We have a volume business, and the ability to analyze the business becomes more and more important. Sure, it’s 50 percent data and 50 percent gut, but the data is important.

It’s a tough job — there are always moments of regret – but it’s been great. Being a CEO is not easy. I really liked Ben Horowitz’ article on making yourself a CEO.

Source: Cal Evans - http://www.flickr.com/photos/calevans/2071724366/

The PHP elephant

VentureBeat: PHP 5 was released in 2004, now we’re on 5.4. Is development slowing down, do you have less to do, or are point releases actually incorporating more functionality?

Gutmans: It’s a balancing act. There are constantly new versions coming out as we see some of the best practices around frameworks, for example in 5.3 support for closures.

On the one hand, you have to be careful you don’t add too many new features. PHP is such a huge community you want it to be stable, but you need to find a balance between being stable and not bloated, but also bringing in new features.

One area that we’re always working on is performance: There’s always more work being done on the engine to find speed improvement.

VentureBeat: When can we expect 6.0? What’s on the road map for that?

Gutmans: There isn’t a road map right now – the PHP community doesn’t always have timetables. 5.5 is being worked on, but the decision on when it’s 6 or 5.5 is based on number of features we’re adding.

And our preference is to keep backward compatibility, too.

VentureBeat: You’ve talked a lot about “cloud-connected mobile apps.” What do you mean by that, and what does that mean for the apps of the future?

Gutmans: We all see how user interaction is moving to mobile first, and by that we mean phones, tablets, and touch, which demand a new interaction paradigm. What’s changing is that the use cases for how you consume services and how you interact change, and that has implications for how you build not only your client side but also your server side.

That’s why I say “cloud-connected-mobile” and not just mobile.

It’s not just about the client, it’s about the services that the client consumes. Business logic runs on the server side, and now the cloud services … they need to tailor to this new interaction paradigm.

VentureBeat: Fast-forward five years. Where is PHP, and where is Zend?

Gutmans: We think PHP has a unique opportunity to be the enterprise standard for web development and mobile.

With the agility and the speed and the interoperability that you need when developing … that is where PHP has a sweet spot. The incumbents like Java and .Net have a tough road. Java, in my opinion, is too heavy a solution and too slow, and .Net has issues because cloud is less Windows-centric.

And the new players, Ruby for example, don’t have the enterprise support that we’ve built over the years for PHP.

So there’s a really great opportunity for PHP to capture those new apps that are being built. You’re still going to have Java forever on the backend.

On the client side … I believe web technologies will ultimately win. As we see mobile take over … you’ll see increased fragmentation, so the web will increasingly be the platform. I think that will happen within 3-5 years.

The main barrier today is probably Apple.

I don’t think it’s going to be a sustaining strategy for them – over time they will have to open up to the web. Right now, Apple is not enabling us today to do mobile apps in the most high performance way … they’re not giving us access to APIs that you can get on Android.

They state security is the reason, but I think they’re trying to create some roadblocks to having an optimized web experience and to protect the objective-C ecosystem.

I’m still a big fan of their devices, though. [He pulls out a iPhone 4S.]

VentureBeat: Are you planning to get an iPhone 5?

Gutmans: I don’t know. Probably not. I do intend to get an iPad mini, however, to replace my first-generation iPad.

Photo credit: John Koetsier

Disclosure: Zend paid most of my travel expenses to attend ZendCon. My reporting, however, remains my own.

Yesterday at ZendCon, Andi Gutmans unveiled new capability in Zend Studio to build “cloud-connected mobile apps.” The latest version of Zend Studio helps developers create web services, intelligent mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, and even your app’s user interface, all in one connected, simplified development environment. In fact, I watched Zend’s Kent Mitchell do it in about 10 minutes.

“It’s pretty cool,” IBMs’ Ryan Watkins told me last night at a ZendCon reception. “It definitely makes it look easy.”

Princeton University’s Henry Umansky, who builds internal web applications for the university’s staff and students, was even more effusive.

“It looks impressive! I think it will be a complete paradigm shift in the way people develop for mobile first,” he said. “And it’s excellent for rapid prototyping. The stakeholders for our projects are generally very visual people.”

The new Zend Studio integrates Cordova, the open-source project better known as PhoneGap, to help developers launch native apps for multiple mobile platforms from a single codebase. That’s what was attractive to Quicken Loan‘s Jim Starr.

“Our developers want to write once and deploy everywhere,” he told me. “I’m intrigued by that.”

Another developer, who didn’t want to be named as he did not have permission to speak for his company, was cautiously optimistic, saying that though he didn’t develop much for mobile at the moment, “things are shifting that way.”

A number of developers I spoke to were, like him, cautiously examining the idea of being able to develop for mobile — almost like a child with a new toy that he or she has not yet determined is fun or scary. For many PHP developers, it seems, the transition from back-end server-side development to new user-interface-centric mobile development is a bit of a leap.

One thing that might be interesting from a Zend point of view: developers who use PHP but don’t use Zend might now be convinced to use Zend’s development stack: Studio, Server, and so on.

“It looks pretty cool. I haven’t used Zend Studio yet,” said Dru Spackman, who builds in the NetBeans IDE but is now considering a change.

photo credit: CalEvans via photopin cc

Disclosure: Zend paid most of my travel expenses to attend ZendCon. My reporting, however, remains my own.

Now stop imagining and just watch the video below.

I just interviewed Kent Mitchell, Zend’s senior director of product management. Zend, of course, is the company that makes the most-used PHP development environment. It’s the company started by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, the primary originators of the PHP language (after founder Rasmus Lerdorf).

PHP jockies out there will be impressed, I think, to find that Mitchell is not just a marketing drone … he’s a full-on, hard-core, honest-to-goodness developer.

And given that Zend just announced the ability to create mobile apps directly within Zend Studio, I challenged him to show me how it works, from start to finish.

I think when you’ll watch that you will find he came pretty damn close:

As Mitchell says, “In just a few minutes, I’ve created a new web service, I’ve deployed it into the cloud, and I’ve created some new widgets on this mobile site. Now, we want to turn around and make this a native application.”

And he does, in just a few more clicks, create a project that is tied to the Xcode tools that iOS developers would normally use to create native apps. The same functionality, of course, is possible for Android applications.

Frankly, this is pretty amazing.

While creating apps, developers can test and view their apps right on their development machine, and integrated debugging is included. It’s an over-used expression, but this is a game-changer for developers and enterprises.

Photo credit: John Koetsier

Disclosure: Zend paid most of my travel expenses to attend ZendCon. My reporting, however, remains my own.

New: watch a PHP developer create a native mobile app in 10 minutes.

This morning at ZendCon, Zend chief executive Andi Gutmans announced that Zend Studio 10 will let PHP developers prototype and build native mobile apps right from the language they know best, PHP. The new capability includes a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop mobile interface builder, integration with the Apache project’s Cordova to access native mobile APIs such as those for cameras and accelerometers, and built-in PhoneGap integration so developers can publish native app packages to the various app stores.

Zend CEO Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012

This is a major game-changer for PHP developers, who until now have been shut out of the mobile app revolution. Apps for iPhone and iPad are coded in Objective-C, while apps for Google’s Android mobile operating system are built in Java. This new announcement means that millions of new developers have just been invited to the mobile development party.

“We’re the only vendor that is really taking a really strong approach on this,” Gutmans told me last week in a sneak preview. “This is a seamless development experience.”

This new capability, Gutmans said, allows developers to build out backend code and front-end interface at the same time. That’s actually the hard part, according to Zend SMO Elaine Lennox.

“Modern apps connect to multiple different back-end systems such as CRM systems, cloud services, and social networks. With all these different data services in lot of different places, wiring them together can be harder to build than the app,” she said. “But now, a developer can go into Zend studio, create the front-end with a WYSIWYG interface builder, and connect it all on the backend.”

But it’s not just about mobile.

Instead, Gutman’s vision is about two massive revolutions: mobile and cloud. The new Zend Server is built for cloud, whether developers use Amazon, Rackspace, Windows Azure, or other clouds. In the new development architecture, apps access clouds, which then access APIs, social services, or SaaS options such as Salesforce.

“We’re giving you a common workflow between client and cloud for building mobile apps,” Gutmans told me. “We’re defining a new architecture: cloud service architecture. I think it’s completely a first … I haven’t seen it before.”

Source: Zend

Zend’s view of the mobile app

Andi Gutmans, who is also one of the primary authors of the PHP language, had hinted at new mobile options for PHP developers to VentureBeat three weeks ago.

Zend and PHP have made significant inroads into the enterprise market in the last few years — Gutmans told me that “when we go up against Java or .Net, we win — and the new integrated development environment for mobile, cloud, and business applications is part of a new mobile-first push for the company.

Citing a study saying that mobile development projects will outnumber PC-focused projects by four to one, and that the world will have 7.4 billion mobile devices by 2015, Gutmans wants to help enterprises create “composite” apps, apps that combine intelligence from internal business systems, external networks and applications, and personalizations to individual users.

The new Zend Studio will allow drag-and-drop connection to various cloud services as well as the visual creation of mobile interfaces, allowing developers to manage all the components of development for complex, connected mobile apps up in one interface.

“We’re bringing mobile and cloud together,” Gutmans said.

And that’s going to give PHP developers — and PHP-using enterprises — a massive new opportunity to use familiar tools to create new experiences for users in the office, and out.

photo credit: Sugar Daze via photopin cc

The key words being until now.

ZendCon, the big PHP conference, is coming up next week in Santa Clara, Calif. And Zend chief executive Andi Gutmans is planning on unveiling some major news about how his company is going help the world’s five million PHP developers — a third of whom are in his database — build for both mobile and cloud.

Today I chatted with Gutmans for a sneak preview, getting a few more details than I did three weeks ago.

“This is a very unique time in information technology history,” Gutmans said. “There are a lot of disruptions happening right now.”

He’s talking about the revolution in mobile, cloud services, and social that we’ve seen take over the technology world. Undoubtedly, PHP has been huge in social — it is, after all, the language in which Facebook is created — and huge in web content, with the world’s leading blogging services (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and more) all created in PHP. The reality is, however, that PHP has not been huge in mobile, where coders write Java to create Android apps and Objective-C to build iPhone and iPad apps. Nor has it had a strong, defined story in cloud services.

But things change.

Change means disruption, and disruption requires agility, Gutmans told me today. That’s exactly what he’s planning to demonstrate Oct. 23 onstage at ZENDcon, when he delivers the keynote address. And that agility means taking PHP beyond where it’s ever been before.

Far, far beyond.

“The biggest changes in technology are how mobile and cloud are converging,” says Gutmans. “Our intention is to tackle both of those head-on for our users.”

Mobile apps require a much more focused attention to users and usability. And we’re seeing mobile apps getting more and more sophisticated, Gutmans says, aggregating data from multiple systems — often cloud services — to deliver top-notch user experiences.

The new version of Zend Studio and Zend Server, plus another as-yet-unannounced tool, are intended to make PHP a big deal in both mobile and cloud development. That’s big news for PHP developers worldwide. And it makes me wonder: What will five million new mobile developers (minus some fraction who probably already also code for mobile) be able to create?

“You’re going to see a lot more from ZEND in the mobile space than you’ve seen before,” Gutmans promised.

Stay tuned!

photo credit: laihiu via photopin cc

A certain kind of developer loves to hate on PHP. They are really going to hate where PHP’s custodians are taking it next.

PHP was created by Danish programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. In 1997, Israeli programmers Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote the parser, creating the base for PHP 3. By 1999, they had built the Zend Engine, which is still the interpreter for PHP.

Update October 18: Andi Gutmans just gave us more details about where PHP is going in mobile.

Gutmans and Suraski continued their partnership with Zend Technologies, a commercial entity that creates add-on products and services for PHP developers, particularly developers in the enterprise.

Today, after multiple massive iterations to the codebase, 35 percent of web traffic is handled by PHP, says Gutmans. Wikipedia says 75 percent of websites use PHP. Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and Photobucket are all built in PHP. WordPress, the most popular blogging platform in the world, runs on PHP and probably accounts for half of that 35 percent. Most of the other major content management systems, such as Drupal and Joomla, are also built in PHP.

No respect?

Still, the language can’t seem to get any respect and has been derided for years by programmers coding in C, Java, .NET, Python, or Ruby. In terms of trends, PHP as a search term has been dropping for years, and the mobile app revolution has led to the revival of Objective-C and Java.

So is the programming language that powers so much of the web disappearing gently into the night?

Not if Gutmans has anything to say about it. VentureBeat talked to him about PHP and the future, and he’s more bullish than ever, especially when it comes to the mobile-focused ace up his sleeve.

Riding the U.S.S. Enterprise

“All dynamic languages are gaining share from Java and .NET right now,” says Gutmans. “We’re getting a lot of benefit.”

Source: Wikipedia

Andi Gutmans

So the noise around trendier technologies like Ruby on Rails or Node.js doesn’t especially bother him. Mindshare is nice, of course, but market share is nicer. And market share is what Gutmans is focused on, especially in the enterprise.

“From a maturity point of view,” Gutmans told me, “I don’t think any other dynamic language right now has the full tool set. Our competition is Java and .NET … never with other dynamic languages.”

While he likes what Ruby on Rails is doing, and thinks there are some things there that PHP can learn and grow from, Gutmans points to PHP’s massive support in packaged solutions like WordPress, Drupal, and Magento.

“We’re better off than we were eight years ago … today we’re the only ones who have really hit the mainstream enterprise,” says Gutmans. “We do believe that the momentum and the size of PHP will continue. We don’t see it slowing down right now.”

Gutmans speaks with the enthusiasm of a founder; of course, there are other companies catering to the PHP-related needs of the enterprise. But Zend remains one of the biggest and best-known, especially due to its provenance.

And he’s got a point: Two-thirds of developers in a recent study reported spending half their time in PHP. And in a recent study by Rails developer Marc Gayle, half of all developer job postings on Craigslist call for PHP developers. When I talked to Gayle, he surmised the reason might be PHP’s super-popular content management systems.

“I think that is skewing the results,” he said. “But I can’t be sure.”

And a mysterious mobile story, coming soon

When it comes to mobile apps, Gutmans sides with the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich in a firmly held belief that the web and web languages will eventually catch up and win out over native stacks.

But, he hinted to me, PHP and Zend will be providing client-side app-enabling tools.

Gutmans declined to comment further, saying he would only announce the full details at Zend’s conference in late October. However, it sounds like PHP will have a mobile app story of some sort, in spite of being the web’s predominant server-side language.

What that looks like and how it will be distributed is still mysterious. But a strong mobile story, says Gutmans, will only help PHP continue to grow.

It’s hard to argue with that.

photo credit: Red Bonzai

“Understanding technology and controlling it with code is becoming the next part of literacy,” said Ryan Carson in a phone chat this morning.

“No one will be able to succeed in their job in the future without that basic skill set. It’s like being able to do math or write or read.”

Carson runs Treehouse, a prominent name in the exploding market of online education for web programming. Companies like Codecademy, Bloc, and a slew of others are jostling for prominence and users as more and more people get the itch to learn how to code — or wake up one day and realize their futures depend on it.

Today, Treehouse has launched a new line of PHP instructional materials — videos, interactive code challenges, quizzes.

And while PHP may not be the trendiest programming language, Carson said it’s still one of the most important.

“No matter what the cool kids are saying about Rails and Python, millions and millions of people want to learn PHP, and a lot of the big sites still run on PHP – Facebook, Zynga, Wikipedia,” he said.

“It’s such a crazy-popular language. … It’s almost the English of the web.”

He ain’t lyin’, folks. A recent survey showed that around 67 percent of developers spent more than 50 percent of their time with PHP. And as a more mature language than its trendy counterparts (launched in 1994), PHP has begun to creep into the enterprise, a.k.a. Java’s last stand. The same survey showed that in large enterprise companies, 33 percent of devs used both Java and PHP at work.

Treehouse offers courses in a range of popular languages, and its audience ranges from school kids in traditional classrooms to adults looking for better opportunities. To those ends, the startup is focused on quality and practicality; it hires full-time teachers and experts to write and teach its courses, and all instructional material is based around real-world projects.

At that point, it’s all about the psychology of the business.

“People don’t actually want to learn technologies, they have something they want to do or want to make,” said Carson. “We actually threw away a lot of our content because it wasn’t project-based.”

Another part of the psychology and practicality is money and aspiration. Recareering and getting more cash has been a huge motivator for many Treehouse users, Carson told us.

“There’s one person in a low-paying job and they realize they could retrain; their goal is to get a higher salary. We heard from an assistant to an exec, and she got a job as an entry-level web designer and increaesd her salary quite a bit.”

Carson also touched on the startup’s nascent job-placement features, saying, “We’re trying to take you from beginner to job-ready in 3 months, and that’s at a cost of $75. And we want to place you in an entry-level developer/designer position. … We’re gonna be graduating students who are job-ready at a junior level.”

The Treehouse users who aren’t specifically trying to recareer, Carson said, are trying to branch out a bit in their current skill sets — designers trying to learn a bit of development, or web devs who need to expand into mobile.

“We just launched our iPhone and Android courses last Thursday, and the uptick is insane. We’ve seen hockey stick growth,” said Carson.

“It’s crazy; I’ve never written a line of Java, so I took our first course and built a very simple Android app. It’s always been a black box to me, but I did it. It’s a fun experience.”

And since the iOS and Android courses teach you how to build the same app, a Magic 8 Ball bit of software that returns strings randomly each time you run it, learners can quickly grasp some of the basic differences between the two platforms.

Over the next couple weeks, Carson told us, Treehouse is going to become more game-like with its features and user interface. “Badges are great,” he said, “but there’s a whole ‘nother level that we think can be added to that.”

The gamification of programming education might have some special meaning for some of Treehouse’s most invested users: School teachers.

“Schools are having a hard time teaching technology because they can’t keep up with the curriculum,” said Carson. “We have hundreds of teachers that use Treehouse in the classroom, and I think they pay for it themselves. They don’t have the budget. … We’re not trying to replace teachers; we’re trying to give them superhero powers, to add another string to their bow.”

For young learners and complete programming noobs, Carson said the newest PHP courses might also be a simpler point of entry. “It’s actually easier to learn than JavaScript or Ruby. … It doesn’t have to be object-oriented. You can kinda jump right in. And from a server support perspective, almost every web company offers PHP hosting.”

Of course, Carson has a soft spot where PHP is concerned. “It was the first web language that I coded in. I used to use O’Reilly’s PHP Cookbook. And back in 2003, that was a great way to learn.”

We can all be grateful that, as great as the O’Reilly lineup is, we have so many online resources now for coding education — at all price points and skill levels — to prepare us for Carson’s vision of a tech-literate future.

Treehouse currently has more than 12,000 paying students and more than $3 million in annual revenue. The startup’s Portland-based team includes more than 50 employees.

But the White House is definitely not doing business — or government, rather — as usual. The U.S. government has released a repository of open source code that allows citizens to create and vote on petitions, the same functionality that drives WhiteHouse.gov.

In September 2011, President Barack Obama made this commitment:

Among our commitments, we’re launching a new online tool — called “We the People” — to allow Americans to directly petition the White House, and we’ll share that technology so any government in the world can enable its citizens to do the same.

Today the White House fulfilled that commitment, as a repository of source code was made public on Github. The web application allows users to create accounts, log in, set up petitions, and vote. Petitions only go public when they cross a designated number of voters, and future development plans include streamlining, API development, a mobile version, and social media integration.

Interestingly, the developers and, presumably, the government chose the GNU General Public License, which Richard Stallman, long a proponent of completely free software, would approve. The GPL grants anyone the rights to use, study, modify, and redistribute software, which is one of the reasons Microsoft argued it was anti-American.

The application, titled Petition, is built on the Drupal content management system, and requires MySQL, MongoDB, and, naturally, PHP. Petition is in alpha, which is a very early stage of software development, but is currently in use already at whitehouse.gov.

Open source: You’ve come a long way, baby.

Image credit: White House/ShutterStock

Zend released its Developer Pulse global survey report this morning. The survey itself was conducted in late November 2011; around 3,335 respondents were polled.

The company itself is known for its comprehensive focus on PHP, the programming language that powers about a third of the Internet, including Facebook, Wikipedia, WordPress, Zynga and many other household-name-type websites and services.

“2012 brings with it escalating requirements for cloud, mobile and social apps,” Zend CEO Andi Gutmans said in a statement, echoing the most dominant trends of the past couple years — the ones that are capturing companies’ imaginations and paying developers’ bills, so to speak.

Here are the findings of the survey:

What devs are working on in 2012: mobile & cloud

According to the Developer Pulse report, around two thirds of developers around the world will be working on mobile app development projects in the next 12 months. And a further 67 percent of the developers surveyed said they wanted to improve their mobile app development skills this year.

Around half of the developers in this survey said they would be working on projects in four key areas: cloud technologies, social media integration, analytics and big data processing, and creating APIs. About 46 percent of the devs (52 percent for large enterprise developers) said they wanted to learn more about cloud application development, and 44 percent said they wanted to learn more about building big data apps.

More than 60 percent of the developers said they will use a public cloud service for their apps this year. Amazon was the most popular option, claiming 30 percent of the audience.

The languages devs are using in 2012

Most programmers these days will learn and use several languages in the course of their career — and depending on the type of work you’re doing, you’ll use several languages over the course of a single project. The Developer Pulse report reflected that the “new norm among developers [is the] use of multiple languages and rising use of dynamic open source languages,” as Zend noted in a release.

However, the four most commonly used languages are those old standbys: PHP, C, Java and JavaScript. According to the report, around 67 percent of devs spent more than 50 percent of their time with PHP (keep in mind, the survey was conducted by Zend, the PHP factory). Zend also says the survey showed an “uptake of PHP in the enterprise.”

In addition to PHP, Zend’s developer respondents said they use one or two other languages on a regular basis, with as many as 33 percent of large-enterprise developers using both Java and PHP.

Music to code by

Whether you’re rockin’ those ubiquitous white earbuds in your cubicle or rocking Turntable.fm throughout the office, if you’re a developer, you’re probably listening to music while you write code. I’m an Iron Maiden girl, myself.

More than anything else, this survey’s respondents agreed that music is the thing for a developer’s ears. What they listened to while working, however, was split along fairly diverse lines of taste and preference.

The survey also shows that while you secretly love Lady Gaga, you will likely take that secret to your grave and only listen to Mother Monster in the privacy of your own headphones.

HipHop is Facebook’s open-source source-code transformer for PHP.

This means that Facebook found a way to make huge applications built in PHP — an easy-for-humans-to-read programming language — run a lot faster by translating the code into a language that’s easier for computers to understand. Facebook itself is built in PHP, so HipHop is part of Facebook’s plan to make its own applications and social network a lot faster.

What the company is announcing today is a new execution engine for PHP that will make both development and code execution faster. Right now, Facebook tells us that the HipHop Virtual Machine is 60 percent faster than the current HipHop interpreter, with a 90 percent reduction in memory cost.​

On the Facebook Engineering blog, Facebook engineer Jason Evans writes that the company is currently using the HHVM internally for everyday software development.

“We expect HHVM to rapidly close the performance gap with hphpc-compiled binaries over the coming months as the dynamic translator stabilizes and matures,” Evans said. “In fact, we predict that HHVM will eventually outperform statically compiled binaries in Facebook’s production environment… The first 90 percent of the HHVM project is done; now we’re on to the second 90 percent as we make it really shine.”

Want to check it out for yourself? It’s all open-sourced on GitHub. So far, around 20 people have contributed to the HHVM project.

Check out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

Engine Yard is a leading PaaS for Ruby on Rails applications. The company supports thousands of customers, including such big names as Groupon, BuyWithMe, the Criterion Collection and more. All those apps on Engine Yard’s platform translate to around 35 million CPU hours every quarter.

With the new alliance in place, Engine Yard will also be equipped to handle PHP apps large and small.

“Engine Yard has powered some of the fastest growing businesses in history. With Orchestra and its team of dedicated PHP contributors joining Engine Yard, we’re extending our platform into an adjacent market to help PHP developers achieve the same success,” said Engine Yard CEO John Dillon in a release.

As part of the acquisition deal, Engine Yard will speed up development of Orchestra’s PHP platform by beefing up investment and adding the Engine Yard team’s expertise to the mix. None of Orchestra’s current offerings, including support for customers or current products, will be discontinued.

Orchestra is built on Amazon Web Services. It integrates with the developer’s workflow, automatically scales up and down and supports third-party add-ons.

The Orchestra team includes highly respected PHP experts, all of whom will be joining Engine Yard, and its list of supported projects includes the development frameworks CakePHP and Lithium, PHP component manager Pyrus, PEAR and PEAR2 library repositories and many others.

The combined team will continue to make substantial investments of time and effort in open-source projects in both the Ruby on Rails and PHP communities.

Here’s a video giving an overview of the acquisition:

Image courtesy of Kore Nordmann.

Check out DevBeat, VentureBeat’s brand new channel specifically for developers. The channel will break relevant news and provide insightful commentary aimed to assist developers. DevBeat is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program.

PHP, which initially stood for “personal home page,” is a relatively simple scripting language that you can embed directly into HTML documents, used primarily to develop web pages.

Based in Cupertino, Calif., Zend says it will funnel the money into further product development, and efforts to broaden its market. It also says that as cloud computing gains momentum, more and more corporate IT departments are relying on PHP to churn out apps custom-tailored to fit their needs — already upwards of 30,000 companies and a third of web sites depend on the language. Zend, started by the actual founders of PHP, wants to remain at the front of this wave.

“The big change came about three or four years ago when the market landscape changed with cloud adoption and the use of PHP for enterprise, giving us a significant monetization opportunity,” says Zend CEO Andi Gutmans. “There has been movement away from enterprise Java to PHP and more lightweight technologies.”

Just last year, the company brought 4,000 new customers into its fold, and established footholds in the U.K., the Netherlands and India. It says a lot of this growth was driven by demand for its Zend Server product, which hosts PHP web applications, and reduces the amount of time and money customer enterprises need to spend on app creation and tracking.

This sounds all well and good, but, as InternetNews also asks, why does a seemingly capital-efficient IT company need to keep adding on so much venture funding? Why isn’t it operating on its own cash flow after a decade of existence? One hypothesis is that demand is increasing so steeply that it needs help catching up. The other is that it’s needed to fend off potential acquisitions on the way to an IPO. The same article says it might be a smart buy for an IBM or Oracle, which it already counts among its partners.

But Gutmans says that the momentum picked up in the last several years has broadened Zend’s business model, resulting in the need for more capital.

“It’s taken a while for open-source to become a first-class citizen within the enterprise world,” he says. “Now that has changed significantly, and the recession has actually accelerated the shift because companies are looking for lower cost solutions and to make bigger changes. So solutions like ours are becoming more appealing.”

In the meantime, the company’s rapid growth is clear. At the start of May, it rolled out a new version of its Zend Studio tool for PHP application development, supposedly making it easier for app creators to identify and fix bugs. This should save customers time and money, especially those that do not have access to their own production servers. Looking ahead, Gutmans says the company will launch a “more expansive, higher-end” product intended to complement the Zend Server and support large enterprise growth.

Zend’s recent round of funding was led by existing backer Greylock Partners, joined by Azure Capital Partners, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, SAP Ventures and Walden International. In the past, it has also taken capital from Platinum Neurone Ventures and TriplePoint Capital.