Zend Studio Gets New Code Tracing Capabilities

May 4, 2010 Alex Woodie

Zend Technologies last week unveiled a new release of its Zend Studio development environment. New code tracing capabilities added in Zend Studio 7.2 work in tandem with Zend Server (which was recently made available on the i/OS platform) to make it easier for developers to find and fix performance problems in PHP applications.

Prior to version 7.2, addressing performance problems from Zend Studio could be a hit and miss affair. It was often a tedious task to reproduce the production environment to recreate problems found in PHP applications.

Now, thanks to the new capability in Zend Studio 7.2 to capture the full code execution of PHP applications in production or test environments, developers can effectively “step back in time” to quickly and easily pinpoint the root cause of problems, Zend says.

Developers will be able to examine code tracing results across a variety of areas, including function calls tree, arguments, return values, duration, and memory usage. The feature “closes the loop” between development and production, and enables them to fix problems faster, Zend says.

Zend expects the new feature to be particularly beneficial to developers who otherwise have no access to production servers. The new code tracing capability only works with Zend Server 5.0, which was recently introduced to the i/OS environment.