Earlier this week, Rogue Wave Software, Inc. announced the company’s acquisition of Zend Technologies Ltd., the industry leader in end-to-end PHP web and mobile application development and deployment solutions. Approximately 50 percent of web workload runs on PHP, including popular content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress and Drupal, which puts Rogue Wave in a position to aid a significant portion of the market.

PHP is a powerful open source, server-side scripting language used by web and mobile application developers to write their underlying code. It is the ‘P’ in the well-known acronym for the LAMP development stack, which stands for “Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.”

As a language, PHP is very similar to C in syntax, but as a scripting language it allows for a great deal more leeway when coding and has its own historical quirks. According to W3Tech’s most recent web technology survey it is used by some of the biggest web giants such as Facebook, Inc., Baidu, Inc. and Twitter, Inc. to power presentation.

Zend has been a part of the PHP web development ecosystem for quite some time, having designed and build the core interpreter of PHP4 in 1998. Zend Technologies was formally established in 1999, headquartered in Cupertino, CA. Now, 17 years later, Zend is still the core of the standard PHP module and supports millions of PHP developers with a broad suite of tools.

“[This acquisition] expands Rogue Wave into PHP web and mobile application development, underscoring our goal to make developers heroes by accelerating their ability to create great code,” said Brian Pierce, CEO of Rogue Wave. “With the addition of Zend, we now have products that speed C, C++, C#, Java, and PHP development, reflecting how software is created today across languages, platforms, and teams.”

Rogue Wave already provides developer tools and resources for the languages listed above–C, C++, C# and Java–adding PHP to that list greatly expands the tool set for its clients into web and mobile.

The Zend tool suite

Amid Zend’s suite of tools, now available from Rogue Wave, are Zend Server, Z-Ray, Zend Studio, and Zend Guard.

The Zend Server is the core PHP interpreter as an enterprise application server used to deliver web and mobile application logic. Z-Ray, a joke about X-Ray, is a debugging service that allows developers to step through PHP code to watch logic as it happens and determine points of fault in code.

Zend Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), an editor that provides a space for developers to watch code form, visualize source and understand logic flow. The IDE supports numerous developer tools for coding such as Eclipse (a development environment), Git code repository, Docker containerization and cloud support for both Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. For mobile development, Zend Studio also supports common libraries such as Angular JS, Ionic and Apache Cordova (a Node.js environment).

On the security side, Zend Guard encodes and obfuscates PHP code to make it difficult to reverse engineer library code. It protects pre-compiled PHP code from tampering and external modification to enable to production of proprietary library source that can be delivered to clients.

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