Zend Opens Zend Server and Z-Ray to Community Innovation with New Add-ons and Plugins Gallery

Community Contributes Joomla, Redis, OPcache and Doctorine2 Support to Zend Gallery in Addition to WordPress, Drupal, Magento and Popular Frameworks

Cupertino, Calif. -- July 15, 2015 – Zend, the PHP company, today announced that the newest leading professional PHP distribution, Zend Server 8.5, now features Zend’s new gallery of community-driven add-ons.  The overwhelming popularity of Z-Ray has now evolved into an ecosystem of innovation around Z-Ray and Zend Server with the unveiling of Zend Gallery. Z-Ray has provided unrivaled visibility into application performance, and the new Zend Gallery will allow unlimited extensibility and innovation that will continue to drive increased value to the entire PHP application lifecycle.

“Productivity and performance are key for today’s PHP development teams. Zend continually strives to both anticipate and meet developer demand with Zend Server, delivering new features and capabilities that expedite development and strengthen performance,” said Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend. “Our new gallery empowers developers to customize Zend Server and offers one-stop access to the extensions and plugins they need to build high quality web and mobile applications.”

The new Zend Gallery aggregates and organizes all Z-Ray extensions and Zend Server plugins in an easy-to-use gallery interface. Developers can now access the growing ecosystem of Z-Ray extensions for frameworks, applications, databases or technologies, as well as new Zend Server plugins, simply and easily from a single interface.

New extensions allow PHP developers to create plugins to extend Zend Server with additional custom features.  Z-Ray, the ultimate PHP productivity solution, is integrated with Zend Server to enable in-depth insight into application code and performance. Today’s release includes new plugins for Joomla, Doctrine2, Redis, OPcache, MariaDB, and LoS Modules. Also included are enhanced plugins for WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Zend Framework, Apigility, Laravel and Symfony.

"As a Joomla community member and Z-Ray for Joomla extension developer, I welcome Zend's new plugins gallery," said Jisse Reitsma, founder and lead developer of Yireo.  "Our new extension to the new gallery will make it a lot easier for developers to create high performing Joomla apps, and I expect many other apps and frameworks to follow suit.”

Announcing Zend Server 8.5/New Features:

Job Queue features now include full support for new multiple queues management.  Different queues can now be defined and prioritized to separate different logical groupings of jobs, such as different apps or even different parts within apps. The management UI has also been improved to help better track execution of jobs, their status, execution time, and output. Unlike cron jobs, Job Queue allows for programmatic, on-the-fly asynchronous execution and advanced management of deferred jobs – including priority-based execution and dependencies.  

New Live Support functionality makes it easier to troubleshoot problems with live end-users in real time, addressing issues that are not otherwise visible or reproducible. A specific user’s session can be Z-Ray enabled, tracked and analyzed without exposing any sensitive information.

Zend Server 8.5 also includes many new enhancements designed to increase productivity and user experience including:

• Redesigned UI for a superior user experience
• App and framework specific built-in routing support
• Enhanced Xdebug support
• Notifications about the environment displayed directly in Z-Ray
• Improved performance and lower memory consumption
• Increased granularity control of the data collected by Z-Ray
• New plugins display with multiple panels now consolidated under one top-level panel
• New capability to perform server-side actions from Z-Ray

Zend Server 8.5 is available today. A free 30-day trial can be downloaded at: http://www.zend.com/en/products/zend_server and will soon be available pre-installed on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

About Zend Server

Zend Server is the most complete professional PHP distribution with advanced value-add capabilities. Zend Server includes more than 80 tested PHP extensions and has added features designed to optimize productivity, performance, scalability and reliability. Enterprise-grade capabilities include built-in job queue, caching management, monitoring and root cause analysis, optimal scalability and reliability with H/A session clustering, multi-server management, unmatched DevOps features, and now a new open gallery.  The new Zend Gallery includes a fast-growing number of plugins and extensions, many contributed by the PHP community.

Zend Server supports Apache, NGINX and IIS Web servers.  It is delivered as native packages for all leading Linux distributions, Windows, MAC OS X and IBM i environments including popular cloud environments such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Zend Server supports any and all PHP code; any code you have in PHP will run on Zend Server.

About Zend Technologies

Zend, the PHP company, was founded by the co-authors of PHP and continues as a dominant entity behind PHP, with open source contributions such as Zend Framework, Apigility and most recently, PHPNG, the engine of PHP 7. Zend is also the leading provider of enterprise-grade PHP solutions and support for development leaders, DevOps and developers. Our customers use Zend Server with Z-Ray, Zend Studio and Zend Guard to improve application performance and quality, speed up their release cycles and mitigate risk. We let you focus on innovation rather than using cycles to manage the stack and troubleshoot issues. Join Zend’s leading customers such as BNP Paribas, Best Buy, GE, Prada and other leading brands worldwide. Visit us at www.zend.com.