New cloud and mobile solutions, along with features to assist IBM i developers using JavaScript and working remotely, may make Zend the software darling of 2011.
For those of us fortunate enough to have had television in the early 1950s, we might remember The Bob Cummings Show, in which dashing young Hollywood photographer "Bob Collins" attempts to romance every attractive starlet in town. Bob's magnetic sign in his photo darkroom, in which he is depicted smiling with open arms as his current bevy of sweethearts is displayed racing toward him on different tracks along the board, reminds me of today's software vendors working hard to earn an embrace by programmers.
Zend Technologies just slid across the board into Bob's—and the users'—arms with recent announcements at ZendCon 2010. Cloud application development and deployment, mobile application development, and mission-critical enterprise application development using PHP have been boosted to new levels with Zend's latest solutions. The nice thing about having IBM as a partner is that IBM i developers aren't left out in the cold. Zend Studio 8 for IBM i was introduced along with regular Zend Studio 8 and offers at least two new features that will make developers' lives easier. Among Zend Studio's regular features are these:
- Instant online debugging and error-fixing against Zend Server for IBM i
- i5 Toolkit support for easy integration with i5/OS legacy applications and data
- Customizable and smart context-sensitive templates for i5 Toolkit functions
- Ability to create PHP toolkit code quickly
- Ability to call RPG/CL/COBOL programs, execute CL commands, retrieve spool file entries, and access data area, data queue, and user space
But the newly released Zend Studio also has a couple more features that IBM i programmers will like. Kent Mitchell, director of product management at Zend Technologies, spoke with MC Press Online following the conference and gave us some insight into how the new features in Zend Studio 8 will help IBM i programmers.
"Anyone writing modern PHP applications might be using JavaScript," says Mitchell. "So all the new JavaScript support in Zend Studio 8 is going to make their lives easier. At ZendCon, I showed it to one of our IBM i customers who is building a new Web site, and they were blown away. They said this is going to make their lives so much simpler.
"The other thing that we did was to really streamline remote system support," says Mitchell. "A lot of our IBM i customers don't work with their projects locally; they work with them [remotely] on the IBM i server. They have to do that in a lot of cases because some of their PHP code may be accessing existing RPG programs. Because they work remotely, Zend Studio’s new remote systems support will streamline their work flows and simplify their lives on a number of levels. We've basically taken the work flows and made them really simple," says Mitchell.
"Also, by moving to the newest version of Eclipse, we should be able to integrate with the IBM tools that are being released in that version of Eclipse. We should see Zend Studio and RPG tools running inside the same Eclipse cockpit, which is a nice feature that will save the developer from having to start two IDEs."
"There will be a general mechanism for executing things remotely and/or locally on the IBM i by sending it to XML," says Mitchell. "What that does is let people write programs and run them on their desktop machines and still call IBM i services," he says. "In effect, a developer could work entirely on his or her Windows laptop running and testing their PHP code, and anytime it needed to call the IBM i, it would basically do it over the database connection to the IBM i, run whatever commands it needed to do there, and bring the data back. That gives the developer the ability to work more seamlessly in a model that's common to other platforms rather than having to set up different workstations for different developers on the server." He said that because IBM is creating the component, it should improve performance over the third-party plug-in currently licensed. He said that is expected to be released early next year.
Zend also introduced Zend Framework 1.11, which includes the Simple Cloud API and adds support for mobile application development. Zend CEO Andi Gutmans notes that customers are making mobile access a top priority, and Zend intends to help applications detect what mobile devices are accessing the Web site—doing so from the server.
The Simple Cloud API is an open-source initiative begun last year by Zend and partners IBM, Microsoft, Nirvanix, Rackspace, and GoGrid to ease the development of cloud applications that can access services on major cloud platforms. Among the first deliverables, Zend Framework 1.11 offers developers Document Service integration to utilize a variety of NoSQL cloud storage solutions, including Amazon SimpleDB and Microsoft Windows Azure table storage. It also offers Queue Service integration to perform asynchronous operations for offloading larger tasks, pre-cache pages, and integration with Amazon Simple Queue System (SQS) and Windows Azure Queue Service. It also integrates with adapters supported by the Zend Framework Zend_Queue component. Framework now offers Storage Service integration to push static resources to the cloud. Currently supported services include Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Microsoft Windows Azure Blog storage, and Nirvanix.
"Vendor lock-in is a concern to many companies thinking about running their applications in the cloud," says Zend Framework project lead Matthew Weier. "With Zend Framework 1.11, developers can start writing cloud applications that support multiple cloud providers, thus mitigating the risk of lock-in," he says.
The new mobile device support in Framework 1.11 provides functionality for detecting mobile device types and their capabilities. Developers can choose from the major publicly available device databases in order to retrieve device capabilities or write their own classes to leverage additional device databases. The new Framework offers mobile support for the Dojo Toolkit 1.5, which delivers a flexible lightweight mobile application framework and widgets optimized for use on mobile devices.
Zend even introduced Zend PHP Cloud Application Platform, a new cloud application platform to accelerate enterprise PHP adoption in the cloud. The new platform enables developers to quickly build portable cloud applications, provides IT operations teams with a reliable and manageable high-performance PHP environment, and offers a model suitable for cloud application deployments, according to Gutmans. The platform offers native and portable cloud services, including rapid development of cloud or native cloud applications using various Zend Framework components. It also includes IDE support for cloud application development and debugging, an enterprise PHP stack including all necessary extensions and drivers, deployment and management for scale-up and error prevention, and monitoring and diagnostics for applications across multiple server instances. Also included are cloud-ready PHP session management and what it calls "graceful" shutdown for fault tolerance and streamlined maintenance.
Zend announced a partnership with RightScale, a leader in cloud computing management, to help manage multiple development and test environments using RightScale's development and test solution pack.
At ZendCon, developers heard from Robert Kerner, vice president of Technology at New York Stock Exchange, who said that the waterfall approach to development doesn't work today. Upon joining the Exchange, Kerner canceled a large development project that didn't live up to expectations, established PHP as his Global Web organization’s Web development platform, and implemented agile development processes in which the development team releases new "business value" every two weeks. His team launched three new customer-facing Web sites in less than five months.
General Electric's CTO, Matt Merchant, another ZendCon speaker and Zend enterprise customer, advised developers to continually search for new ways to simplify the development process. Merchant said that GE was able to reduce its development time on large projects by 39 percent simply by cleaning up the development process.
Author and RPG programmer Jeff Olen spoke to Gutmans at the start of ZendCon and asked him about the relevance of PHP certifications for IBM i programmers. Olen says that some IBM i programmers are transitioning to using Zend Framework but feel they don't necessarily need to obtain certification since they are working exclusively on the IBM i. Gutmans replied that the Zend certifications, while more difficult than many Microsoft or even IBM certifications, are valuable for both programmers and employers because they create perceived value for possessing PHP and Zend Framework skills.
"Personally, I think that certification is very valuable to people because...it helps validate to users that they really have reached the level appropriate to expectations in the market.... It doesn't validate just knowledge," says Gutmans. "It validates experience."
Gutmans went on to say that PHP is becoming increasingly important to enterprises today because they are being asked to produce more in the form of Web applications but aren't always given more budget. With PHP, developers can be more productive than with, say, Java, though he says Java likely will continue to be used internally.
"They're not dropping Java," said Gutmans in response to a question by Olen. "They still have Java internally, but they have come to the realization that they have to rapidly deliver and efficiently manage dynamic applications on the Web, and they need to be using PHP in order to meet these needs. The Web is growing quickly, and mobile is going to make it grow even faster. I don't think companies are getting a lot more resources to accomplish these tasks."
Following this year's ZendCon, it appears that Zend is more than meeting the needs of developers, who may be waiting with open arms; it is meeting the needs of today's budget-strapped enterprise IT departments by providing a cost-effective way to enable cloud and mobile computing.
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