PHP Devs Want Mac Support; Zend Gives It to Them

If you were wondering whether Mac developers were also facing the pressure to become polyglot programmers so many industry watchers mentioned in their 2012 predictions (like this one and this one), consider the recent announcement from Zend Technologies. The creator and commercial maintainer of PHP announced the general availability of its Web app server, Zend Server 5.6, featuring new support for Macheads.

According the company's CEO and co-founder Andi Gutmans, Zend has been seeing an increased demand from "the community that develops on the Mac."

"We've seen this demand for Mac support from the Zend PHP developer community, at the annual ZendCon event, on Zend Forums and among user groups worldwide," Gutmans told me in an e-mail. "Now, Mac developers can leverage the agility of PHP for Web app development when they use Zend Server, with the best PHP runtime, powerful monitoring, diagnostics and performance optimization."

Okay, maybe it was his PR team. The point is, Zend does a consistent job of responding to trends surfaced by customers asking for new features. Not bleeding-edge fads, but real, late-in-the-hype-cycle trends. Last August, for example, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company released Zend Server 5.5, which essentially addressed the increasing unpredictability of traffic and workloads caused both by the growing popularity of the cloud and the proliferation of end user devices. Mobile and the cloud are not breaking news. Zend was responding directly to customer demand, Kent Mitchell, Zend's director of product management, told me at the time.

And now Zend is responding to Mac developers who, they say, want to have access to the full suite of Zend Server application development capabilities previously available only to Linux and Windows developers. Actually, that should be enterprise Mac developers. And my lead sentence should probably have read, "If you were wondering whether Mac is moving into the enterprise…"

Gutmans' PR team also sent an interesting list, entitled "Why Mac Matters to the Development World," which included:

• There are now nearly 60 million Mac users worldwide.
• Mac runs neck and neck with Linux based on Zend's 3-year history of Zend Studio IDE downloads
• Zend has seen steadily growing interest for Zend Server's enterprise-class capabilities on the Mac platform -- from within the Zend PHP developer community, at the annual ZendCon event, on Zend Forums, and among user groups worldwide.

As Mac use grows in the enterprise, the company reasons, so does PHP use.

More info on Zend Server is available on the company Web site. There's also video tour of the product.

Posted by John K. Waters on February 1, 2012