PHP 4.0 Release Features Zend Engine; Quality Scripting Engine Revolutionizes PHP.

Business Editors & High-Tech Writers

TEL AVIV, Israel--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 22, 2000

The PHP Association (www.php.net) has announced the release of PHP 4.0, a significant accomplishment realized by the international community of PHP developers.

PHP is built around the Zend Engine developed by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, co-founders of Zend Technologies Ltd. The Zend Engine features a complete restructuring of the way PHP processes code -- though it features backward compatibility with PHP 3. Zend Technologies remains committed to continuing improvements on the Zend Engine for the open-source PHP development community.

The Zend Engine speeds the performance of PHP 4.0, making it many times faster than PHP 3. This performance benefit was accomplished by changing the execution paradigm from an execute-while-parsing mode to a compile-then-execute mode.

Users of the Zend Engine are impressed by the performance boost. "I converted Keystone over to running the Zend (PHP 4.0) Engine, and saw a huge jump in performance," said Stonekeep (www.stonekeep.com) Webmaster, Dave Belfer-Shevett. "Now I recommend PHP 4 to everyone."

"PHP is very widely used, both for Web development and for database-driven applications," said Suraski. "We developed the Zend Engine in order to speed up execution; but with more than two million sites (Netcraft survey) and applications using PHP 3 today, backward-compatibility was of primary concern. For almost all users, an upgrade to PHP 4.0 won't require any changes to the PHP scripts. They simply upgrade the server, and everything runs the same -- just faster."

Suraski and Gutmans have been part of the PHP open-source community for several years, and are also members of the Apache Software Foundation. PHP is the most popular module on Apache servers, which now comprise 60 percent of the servers on the market. Tens of thousands of downloads from the PHP.net site occur monthly.

PHP is a server-side scripting language for development of dynamic Web pages and Web-enabled applications. One of PHP's greatest advantages is its cross-platform support of many UNIX variants, Linux and Windows. PHP can run as an Apache module or as a native ISAPI extension for IIS and Zeus.

One of the most popular solutions available today for developing dynamic Web sites, PHP offers excellent connectivity to most of the common database interfaces (including Oracle, Informix, Sybase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, ODBC and many others). PHP also offers integration with various external libraries with utilities for everything from generating PDF documents to parsing XML.

Zend Technologies is a company, which develops and markets Internet infrastructure software programs. In addition to offering proprietary and revenue-generating products, Zend remains committed to the advancement and proliferation of PHP as a freeware, open-source scripting language. The company will continue to offer expertise and technical backing to the PHP open-source community. Much synergy exists between the success of PHP as open source and the success of Zend Technologies.

Zend recently released the Zend Optimizer, the first in a series of products for PHP developers. The Zend Optimizer, which works in conjunction with PHP 4.0, uses multi-pass code optimizations to double the running speed of PHP 4.0 applications. This is done by running several optimization passes on the code created by the run-time compiler before the code is executed.

For general information on Zend and PHP, visit http://www.zend.com. For an introductory tutorial on PHP, see http://www.php.net/tut.php.