Comments on: Is Zend really the PHP company?

By: Shaun Farrell

Shaun Farrell — Sat, 16 May 2009 23:30:55 +0000

I agree with Radoslav Stankov – I’m not sure what PHP would be like without Zend. Though saying that I’m happy that a company has good interests and in an open source language. It could mean good things in the future…. (or bad)…

By: Radoslav Stankov

Radoslav Stankov — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:52:00 +0000

Zend is PHP company, but It is not THE PHP company. I really don’t know how PHP would look like if there wasn’t Zend.

By: James

James — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:14:33 +0000

@Giorgio – what about Roadsend PHP? That is a totally separate PHP implementation that does not use Zend.

I think to some degree Zend is influential, as Thomas M says, Zend Framework is a good example of that. I don’t see Zend as owning PHP per se – it’s open source software – everyone owns it!

By: Giorgio Sironi

Giorgio Sironi — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:25:13 +0000

Zend might not be the proper owner of the source code, but every php variable is stored in a C structure named of type zval, that seems to come from ‘Zend’. I do not know another parser for php apart the Zend one.

By: John Rockefeller

John Rockefeller — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:27:05 +0000

It makes for an interesting read and tidbit of news but in the end it doesn’t really matter. PHP is yet another great example of distributed collaboration through open-source.

By: Thomas M

Thomas M — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:06:49 +0000

I don’t think that Zend need to own the language nor be active in guiding its development to call itself the PHP company.

It’s closer to PHP than any other company imo and projects such as the Zend Framework show that it’s still guiding the community in certain areas.

By: Carl McDade

Carl McDade — Sat, 09 May 2009 12:42:51 +0000

This makes me wonder even more about just where Zend is placing itself.

Zend Technologies is best known for its founders Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski who, along with other Israeli graduates of the Technion, extended PHP after its creation by Rasmus Lerdorf.

In 1997, Zeev and Andi rewrote the parser behind Rasmus Lerdorf’s PHP-FI. The result was released as PHP 3. In 1998 they redesigned that parser completely, and named it the Zend Engine. PHP 4 was based on the first version of the Zend Engine and was extremely successful.

If the inventor(s) company has very little presence in the development of the language and does no PR, then how can they afford to stay in business.

Sun does have influence over Java and seems to be actively guiding its directions. But Zend has no such status with PHP? I find this very hard to swallow.