Zend Engine

The Zend Engine is an interpreter for the PHP scripting language and a virtual machine. It is distributed as free software under the PHP license.

With Zend, the program code goes through several compilations to executable machine code. An intermediate representation is the so-called Zend opcode, an even platform-independent bytecode (as in Java). The engine is designed so that the cache may be interposed in order to minimize redundant byte generation and as to make the embodiment more efficient. In addition to proprietary, fee-based product from the same company ( Zend Optimizer) there for a number of free solutions.

Etymology / word origin

The name "Zend " comes from the name of the developer of the Zend Engine, Zeev and Andi Gutmans Suraski. Together they started during their studies with the development and later founded the company Zend Technologies.

History

The Zend Engine has been developed by Zeev and Andi Gutmans Suraski since they were PHP / FI 2 to weak for e-commerce. First, the version 0.5 was released together with the PHP version 3 on 6 June 1998. Changes compared to the interpreter of PHP / FI 2 were the better performance as well as some changes to the syntax and behavior of PHP. Version 1.0 was released on 22 May 2000 together with PHP 4. It supports sessions and basic object -oriented programming. Since version 2.0 is possible with many new functionalities serious object-oriented programming. In version 2.1, especially the performance has been improved, whereas the addition version 2.2 has an improved memory management. As of version 2.3, the Zend engine supports namespaces, as of version 3.0, the default character set is changed to Unicode.

See also: PHP

Related Products

→ Main article: Zend Technologies

In order to optimize the source code further, the Zend Optimizer was developed, which acts as a supplement to the Zend Engine. Furthermore, the Zend Optimizer to run encrypted with Zend Guard PHP source code is needed.

Comments

The version number of the Zend Engine corresponds to the PHP scripting language minus 3 because is supported starting with version 1.0 of the Zend Engine PHP version 4.