Update 10/2010:

It’s possible to find further markdowns on all the Zend software offerings by checking the zend coupon page here on softwarediscountvoucher.com, which will come as a relief to those of you who have been perturbed by the steep asking price of Zend studio in particular.

thanks!

A sample answer to the Zend exam?

Zend offer comprehensive training to go with the Zend Framework and Zend Studio. You can get a year of support with an online training package together from zend (click above for more info). You can also take Zend PHP 5 Certification exams, and their course of the fundamentals of the Zend framework. Zend training is provided on certain dates through the online meeting tool WebEx, supplying training in real time. You will need to take your zend training course online within year of purchasing.

Use Zend Guard to protect and optimize your PHP applications

Zend Guard is probably the most used product for PHP encryption available online. It prevents people from using your PHP products without paying for your license and reduces the likelihood of reverse engineering. If you’ve spent a long time developing a PHP program you may wish to make some cash out of it, and as PHP development goes commercial more evaluation copies are being provided. The problem is, PHP is rightly designed for code to be shared, but unfortunately sometimes people won’t be able to develop without financial support and thats where Zend Guard comes in. Zend Guard has been available for 7 years and is the most adopted techonology on the internet for protecting commercial PHP code. It integrates easily with Zend Studio so any apps built on the Zend Framework can be quickly protected, though supported is also offered for standard PHP 4 and PHP 5 programs. Zend Guard works by compiling PHP code into native machine code, which is both faster to exectute and harder to decompile.

Zend Server is web server designed with a extremely efficient processing of PHP and the php based Zend Framework in mind. Zend Server community edition is free and has a complete stack just for php that can run non-critical applications very efficiently. It is easier to install than some other webservers without a company backing the install pricedure. The paid for Zend Server is more appropriate for crticial enterprise level applications that require rigorous code testing and full Java connectivity.

Zend Studio is pretty much the commercial wing of Zend. It is an IDE which aids rapid development of the free Zend framework. It integrates tightly with the zend framework, quickly generating code for common patterns. It is based on the PHP Development Tools plugin for the free Eclipse IDE. Among other things, Zend Studio 5 supports code folding, an MVC view and code generation, PHP 4 and 5 support, PHP debugging, an interface to the Zend Server API, PJHP unit testing, quick deployment through subversion or ftp and MySQL (and others) database access. Zend studio is now up to Zend Studio 7.0 which supports up to the latest PHP 5.3 deployment. At the time of writing a beta version of Zend Studio 7.1 is available, together with and IBM i Edition developed with IBM.

The Zend frame work is an open source oop framework that is run on PHP 5. It is licensed under the commercially friendly New BSD License to make it appropriate for buisienss use. It was started in 2005 to compete with existing web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and has quickly grown, with Zend.com now reporting over 10 million downloads. The support has also quickly grown to what you would expect from an enterprise level framework, with a 1000+ page reference guide and over 500 examples. The Zend framework has a learning curve that is simliarly quick to that of PHP, developers can fall back into standard php when required and standard design patterns such as MVC are supported but not required.

The Zend Server is also available to allow you to run the Zend Framework with native OS support and caching optimisations; though the Zend framework can run on other servers such as Apache, the Zend server provides optimisations such as opcode support for quick execution at the native level. Zend studio provides easy generation of MVC code generation and tightly integrated editing for rapid development of Zend framework applications. Zend Studio costs, in contrast to the Zend Framework itself and the community edition of Zend Server which are both free. There’s a really great rundown of the zend framework on snook.ca if you fancy having a look.

All code that is merged into the main branch of the Zend Framework requires unit tests that cover 80% of the code meaning any stable branches are very stable.