Zend Debuts Studio 10 Beta

November 6, 2012 Alex Woodie

Zend Technologies used its annual ZendCon conference last month to unveil beta releases of three products, including Zend Studio 10, Zend Server 6, and Zend Server Gateway. While Zend wants customers to use all three products together, IBM i shops will be most interested in the beta of Zend Studio, which brings new cloud, mobile, and productivity features.

Zend Studio is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment that provides a spectrum of tools for rapidly writing rich Internet applications, with PHP back ends, JavaScript and JQuery front ends, and REST Web services connecting them. Studio offers productivity features like code refactoring, code generation, code assist, and code tracing, and deploys finished apps to on-premise servers (including Unix, Linux and Windows via the plain vanilla Zend Server PHP runtime, and IBM i with the Zend Server for IBM i runtime) or the cloud.

With version 10, Zend says it’s made hundreds of improvements to common Studio workflows, including application debugging across PHP and JavaScript components; integration with source control repositories (including SVN, CVS, Git, and GitHub); and new unit testing, profiling, and production debugging.

Zend Studio’s mobile story gets better with the inclusion of PhoneGap Apache Cordova) and JQuery tools, which allow users to write, test, and package mobile apps that run on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. Also, the new Zend Server Gateway, which is included in Zend Studio 10, includes a lightweight API stack that simplifies the task of connecting mobile devices to the PHP application, according to Zend.

Studio 10 brings developers two options for deploying PHP apps to a cloud for testing purposes, including the Zend Developer Cloud, a free PHP stack that supports deployment to a variety of production cloud environments, and Red Hat‘s free, open-source, cloud-based PHP stack, called OpenShift, that provides simple snap-in of other components like MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. OpenShift also supports other languages, including Java, Ruby, Node.js, Perl, and Python.

Zend Studio 10 supports PHP version 5.4.5 and 5.3.15, and uses Eclipse 4.2.1 (Juno) as its base. It also includes Zend Framework 2, the latest release of the application foundation for building and running PHP applications without a lot of coding.

IBM i shops are advised to wait for the release of Zend Framework 2.1 to gain the DB2 for i database connector. ZF 2.l was expected to be released last month. The current release of Zend Server for IBM i is version 5.6, which supports PHP 5.3 and was released early this year.