On 9 Sep 2008, at 18:52, Nathan Rixham wrote:
Short and sweet; does anybody have any practical experience; thoughts or case studies in regards to implementing the Zend Platform.
Yeah, I used it in my previous job a coupla years ago. It looks great, the marketing hype is well executed but as usual the reality is far from the promise. There are some aspects I really like, but mainly in concept. What you actually get is expensive extra bloat to install on your servers.
* The bytecode cache can be replaced by one of several free solutions out there.
* The job queue is a great idea but the implementation is problematic at best. Avoid this if you can.
* The centralised logging and the alerting features are nice - this is probably the only but I really found useful.
* The clustering features I did not use so didn't look at too closely, but it didn't appear to offer anything that couldn't be replicated pretty easily with open source tools.
At the end of the day what you're buying is marketing hype, and there are people out there who fall for it hook line and sinker. My advice is that unless you have someone insisting you use ZP, don't. And even if you do I urge you to look at what you actually need from it and evaluate alternatives before making a commitment. Have you ever heard about Facebook, Yahoo or any other big player using it?
Don't get me wrong, I think Zend is a great company, but I just don't see the value in ZP. For the price of the license you could add another server which will give you far better ROI and higher capacity then ZP could ever achieve.
And don't get me started on what they've done to Zend Studio. I've switched to Aptana - same platform, but cheaper and a lot more stable. Shame!
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