Zend Hits the Throttle with PHP Dev Tool

November 12, 2013 Alex Woodie

Certain development-related processes will run up to twice as fast in the latest release of Zend Technologies‘ development tool for PHP. Zend Studio version 10.5 also brings enhancements in the area of documentation, testing, and validation.

Developers don’t have to use Zend Studio to write PHP-based Web and mobile applications that run on IBM i, Windows, or Linux platforms. But considering the integration that exists between Studio and Zend’s various runtimes, including Zend Server 6 for IBM i, developers who use them together can expect things like debugging, application monitoring, and performance tuning to go a little smoother.

That’s not to say that developers won’t go off the rez with the Zend tools. In fact, the company says it rewrote its Composer function to improve the reliability of dependency management tasks, and to make it easier to ensure that components brought into a Zend Studio project from outside PHP frameworks work well with Zend framework components.

Other development-centric tasks, such as code analysis and validation processes, will also run better with version 10.5. The company says the new release will help developers produce more reliable code thanks to an updated version of the PHPUnit library and improved workflows for running unit tests. The new release also makes it easy to create comprehensive documentation for one’s code with Studio 10.5, which includes PHPDocumentor 2. Integration with the Git code repository is now included by default in Studio 10.5, the company says.

“Zend Studio 10.5 will validate and analyze your code on the fly and guide you through how to use new APIs, frameworks and libraries via intuitive content assist,” says Natalia Bartol, a team leader for Zend Studio. “It integrates and leverages popular tools like Composer and PHPDocumentor to support the full development cycle for PHP projects.”

On the mobile front, Zend Studio 10.5 ships with an upgraded version of Apache Cordova, the shell environment that enables users to generate native mobile applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The release of Cordova in Studio 10.5 offers better performance, as well as native support for native Windows Phone 8 apps.

Licenses for Zend Studio 10.5 start at $189. For more information, www.zend.com.