Zend Technologies is providing more details on the construction and operation of phpcloud.com, the company's technology platform and partner ecosystem for cloud-based PHP application development and delivery. Zend cofounders Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski have been speaking at the annual ZendCon user conference to explain how phpcloud.com vies to bring together an open technology platform and a partner ecosystem that will offer a smarter way of working in the cloud.
Zend is collaborating with industry-leading partners who are committed to supporting deployment of cloud-ready apps running on the Zend Application Fabric. Joining Zend in cloud-focused keynote presentations at ZendCon will be Amazon Web Services, IBM, Rackspace, Red Hat, and RightScale.
According to Zend, with phpcloud.com, PHP developers can experience the power of an iterative development environment and an automated, massively scalable production environment, with the freedom to deploy on any cloud. Within this new cloud offering is the Zend Application Fabric, which exists to provide an open, elastic platform with everything needed to successfully run and scale business-critical PHP applications on public and private cloud infrastructures.
Streamlining development, testing, and deployment processes saves time and helps improve application quality. Auto-scaling leverages the cloud's elastic nature to maintain high availability despite fluctuating and unpredictable demand. Cross-cloud portability provides freedom of choice to deploy to leading cloud infrastructures, including Amazon Web Services, IBM SmartCloud, Rackspace, and Red Hat — as well as for deployment on-premise. The ability to optimize performance helps ensure that modern web applications meet users' high expectations for responsiveness.
Zend Developer Cloud provides both a free developer sandbox that is said to enable developer productivity and "deep application insight" tools such as code tracing that enable real-time debugging and problem resolution. Zend Developer Cloud also offers collaborative capabilities, making it easy for developers to share source code files, show work in progress to stakeholders, and team up productively on large-scale joint development projects.
ZendCon attendees are also the first to preview new cloud capabilities in Zend Framework, the leading application development framework for PHP applications. Zend Framework 2.0 will include a new version of SimpleCloud API, featuring the ability to manipulate cloud server instances on Amazon EC2, RackSpace, Windows Azure, and GoGrid. Zend Framework's Model-View-Controller (MVC) layer has been rearchitected to deliver significant advances in both performance and flexibility. In addition, a new event system enables integration with Zend Framework workflows and provides flexible workflows in enterprise applications.
