The Zend Store

mejner

Ok guys and gals,

what do we think about the products released by Zend? My company bought the packade, but I've only tried the Zend IDE, my view is that it's a pretty crapy coding enviroment, but the debugger can be usefull.

What do you guys think? Pros and cons about the rest of the products?

Anon

heh... i doubt a lot of people will answer this 🙂

btw, if, for some reason you want to make your copy available to public, nobody here would mind that 🙂

what kind of protection there? is it just the license key or it actually confirms the license with the Zend server?

mejner

Pbulic? Ok, I'll have a look at that.

It doesn't seem to be any kind of protection at all actually. We bought a copy that several of us installed, just executed the setup files, no license key like MS or anyhing.

I've read your previous postings about Zend products. Clearly you don't have a company that will pay for the products so just like we've been/we are using MS enterprise products for personal use you'll probably end up using the Zend products that way. And aslong as you don't make any money by doing so I don't think they will or should ming too much... ;-) I mean it's good for them.

Bottom line though, if it's in a commercial production it is ofcourse very tabu to steal software.

Btw, do you know if the Encoder will do "the Java thing" and optimize the code or anything like that? Iow, will it just make my code non-readable for my customers or will it actually improve the scalability of my web app?

Cheers!

Anon

no the encoder has the sole purpose of protecting your source code

optimizations are done via the optimizer and especially via the cache since then the compiler does more passes since the scripts are only recompiled after changes

the cache is actually the product i was most interested, and where i am most disappointed in the pricing (i think the pricing for the encoder enterprise edition is high but ok and i will not buy it for now, maybe later)

the ide would have been a nice thing, but before i hear some more testimonials i will not even look at it (it would cost me $210 a month in my company .. i could by a ton of homesite/ultraedit licenses for that kind of money)

btanner

Actually the encoder first runs the code through the optimizer and then encodes.... so the code will not be faster than code using the optimizer, it will be just as fast....

This allows it to be fast, and it is much harder to reverse engineer optimized code.

Anon

I would be very interested in seeing some screenshots if someone cared to post them. The pics on Zend aren't all that hot.

I was disappointed that - at least as far as I could tell - a demo wasn't downloadable.

What other observations have you had running the IDE?
thanks,
Ben

Anon

I just found out thatdebugger doesn't work under win32... kinda sad 🙁

Anon

The Zend Products use a program called FLEXlm that does some verification based upon the ethernet address. We have to provide the ethernet address (MAC Address) to Zend in order for the products to run.

This is for the products included in the Commercial Subscription Plan anyways.

Anon

Could you or anyone else please post some specific comments on the IDE product?

I am considering the IDE product as there really is not a good PHP IDE out there (that I can find). However, the yearly subscription price for the commercial license (which I would need since I develop PHP programs for businesses) is expensive.

Zend is even charging $92 for the 30-day trial version.

Thanks in advance.

Bruce

btanner

UltraEdit with the PHP wordfile is pretty good.

The zend IDE is slow (its java). Its a little clunky, and it doesn't work with a Windows Server, apparently.

It looks like it could be useful... but I am not sure if I will migrate from my good ole souped up text editor.

mejner

Take a look here:
http://www.mejner.com/zend_ide2.gif

Probably the debugger is the only usefull thing in this product.

Anon

well and unfortunatly you cannot by the server seperate .. and they do not have an open api to the debug server either

so you are ineffect lockinto using their ide for debugging

Anon

Brian,

Where can I get the PHP wordfile that you mentioned?

Thanks in advance,

Norberto Henriques

btanner

Its on the ultraedit website under word files.. I use the PHP 4 one.

Anon

Russian programmers rock! 🙂

Just check out the debugger for PHP:

http://dd.cron.ru - I use it with PHPed IDE - it's quite useful, but sometimes buggy...