PHP Today

PHP is approaching its 4.1 landmark version. This section looks at the current state of PHP.

Applications Developed in PHP

For a complete list of PHP applications, go to http://www.php.net/projects.php.

Here are a couple of PHP applications that stand out:

• Midguard: Midguard is a powerful database-driven content-management system for the web and WAP.

• Phorum: Phorum is a PHP-based discussion forum. PHP applications are popular, and although they are open -source, they tend to use the MySQL database as the supported database.

Products for PHP

The following is a list of products that are available from the Zend Corporation. You can download them from http://www.zend.com/zend/products.php.

• Zend Optimizer: The Zend Optimizer is a freely available extension to PHP that allows your code to be optimized before it is run by the PHP core . This improves your code's speed and efficiency. We will look at how to use the Zend Optimizer in Chapter 2, "Installation and Optimization."

• Zend Cache: The Zend Cache is a commercial add-on product for PHP that improves speed by optimizing code and caching repetitive code. The performance improvement can be huge if you are really crunching code. The cache also comes complete with a friendly GUI system so that you can control the cache and benchmark if you want to.

• Zend Encoder: The Zend Encoder is a commercial add-on product for PHP that allows you to encode your PHP scripts so that they can't be read by others but can still be run through PHP. If you want to protect your PHP code, this system is ideal.

• Zend IDE: A commercial Java-based IDE editor (thus, it runs on both Windows and Linux platforms), Zend IDE provides PHP syntax color coding, debugging, and more. Zend has said that it will add more to the editor over time.