On January 22, 2008 Zend Technologies, Inc. released Zend Studio for Eclipse 6, a new IDE for the PHP programming language. It is the successor to Zend Studio 5, and as the name implies, is built on top of the Eclipse IDE framework. Unless you have been programming in a cave somewhere, you already know that in the last few years Eclipse has grown to become the most popular and powerful programming environment on the planet. Eclipse has an open plug-in architecture, and Zend has created a set of PHP plug-ins that draw upon the power the Eclipse framework offers. [More…]

The LAMP/WAMP (Linux/Windows Apache MySQL & PHP) web server stack has evolved into a viable lightweight network server platform. One of the problems of using WAMP servers is the way CGI processes are evoked. When PHP is used as a CGI process, it is reloaded each time a PHP script is called. A new instance of PHP runs each time a script executes. To get around this limitation, web servers running a FastCGI module can keep a service loaded so it doesn’t need to load anew each time it is evoked. [More…]