Zend Technologies has announced a range of products and services for PHP 7.

Zend developers have been working on PHP 7, which is due for release later this year and the company has released new versions of Zend Server, Zend Studio, and Zend Professional Services. 

These announcements followed hard on the heels of news of the acquisition of Zend Technologies by development tools vendor Rogue Wave Software. Zend CEO Andi Gutmans has joined Rogue Wave as executive VP. Gutmans has been a major player in the development of PHP. He and Zeev Suraski developed the heart of PHP 3 before founding Zend. PHP 7 is powered by the Zend Engine, an optimization engine for PHP, and the forthcoming release is expected to dramatically improve performance.

Writing about the new releases, Gutmans says:

“Our team has been working incredibly hard to make PHP 7 satisfy industry expectations of performance and functionality. This is the ‘year of PHP’ and we are enjoying a PHP renaissance. The entire PHP ecosystem is evolving so quickly, and the differences between PHP 5.6 and 7.0 are simply staggering. Zend engineers have achieved performance gains ranging from 25 percent to 70 percent on real-world apps -- and all from simply upgrading PHP, without having to change a single line of code.”

The new Zend Studio 13 comes with a PHP 7 Express migration assistant. This scans code to provide precise details of what needs to be changed for the code to run it smoothly on PHP 7 and for compatibility issues - such as new reserved words and deprecated usages in PHP 7 - displaying any issue it identifies in a list in a dedicated new view.

Another recent announcement is that Zend Server 8.5 for PHP 7 is now in technology preview. The main change to this version is support for PHP 7, but Zend also announced that the server is now available on Google Cloud Platform. Zend Server is available from Google Cloud Launcher, so developers can deploy it with just a few clicks. Zend’s initial offering on Google Cloud Platform is Zend Server 8.5 Developer Edition. This edition includes the latest Z-Ray plugins and extensions.

Other improvements to Zend Server 8.5 include a redesigned UI, app and framework specific built-in routing support, and new Xdebug support. Performance has been improved, memory consumption has been lowered, and multiple queue management has been added.  

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