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.”

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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 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.

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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

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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