Zend's entry into China: Opportunities for PHP in China

Author: heiyeluren & lt; heiyeluren_at_Gmail.com & gt; Time: 2005-9-9 blog: blog. csdn. netheiyeshuwuZendTechnologies is the official sponsor of php. Although PHP is an open-source project, Zend is responsible for development tools, training, and certification, because the core ZendAPI of PHP is developed by Ze author: heiyeluren
Time: 2005-9-9
Blog: http://blog.csdn.net/heiyeshuwu

Zend Technologies is the official sponsor of php. Although PHP is an open-source project, Zend takes care of development tools, training, and certification, because the core Zend API of PHP is provided by Zend, Zend is the PHP support provider. At the beginning of this year, major international vendors, including IBM and Oracle, proposed support for PHP, further stimulating the development of PHP, zend has become an important task for Zend.

Rasmus Lerdorf, the founder of PHP, came to Beijing in March to provide training for Yahoo. at that time, I guessed that PHP might want to make a difference in China. At the beginning of this year, I heard that Zend wants to expand the Chinese market, because in China, the PHP language is also named like jsp, asp, and other Web development languages, there have been no particularly powerful support groups, but there are only phpe.net, phpx.com and other private groups. However, phpe.net has not been updated in the last half of the year, and php & more magazine has published a series of issues. what do I think of phpx.com is limited to the questions raised by many PHP beginners on the forum, in the long run, PHP developers will lose motivation, and PHP will also lose the market in China. in particular, the recent combination of Ruby On Rails attacks, and the future of Perl and PHP may lose the market.

However, the world is not that simple, because Zend has been officially preparing to enter the Chinese market. First, they launched a Chinese open source site: PHP China (www.phpchina.com) in September 1 this year ). The homepage of the website is described as follows:
Phpchina is a public and non-profit technology exchange website. it is a free platform for php fans and users to publish news and exchange technologies, a php Chinese official website fully supported by PHP China Alliance, professional PHP Zend in the United States, Skinova in PHP China, major portals in China, and PHP professional websites.

In China, they first found the cooperation with Discuz, and adopted their forum 4.0RC1. Discuz should have gone early in China and maintained the forum for a long time, many well-known forums have vanished. Currently, Discuz, phpWind, and other forums are emerging. Discuz is one of the best in terms of technical strength and user base, discuz adopts open-source products and commercial products and adopts a strategy to attract personal webmasters and commercial users. Therefore, PHP China chose this mature product.

To attract users to the PHP China Forum, they have adopted many attractive methods, such:
In order to promote website construction and encourage the active participation of members and contribute to the development of PHP in China, the PHP alliance will discuss and decide that Zend and Skinova will sponsor gifts and launch Awards for Advanced members.

Of course, these are only the first step of localization. In fact, the core of Zend is to provide certification, training, development tools, and other services in China. these services are only auxiliary functions.

Currently, the most widely used PHP portals in China, including Sina, Yahoo, Tom, etc. each company has its own mature development framework, combined with the extension libraries Smarty, PEAR, and ADOdb, these libraries can basically meet the needs of the enterprise architecture. However, in the enterprise application field, PHP is not enough than Ruby On Rails in a fast development mode.

* The object-oriented mechanism is not perfect. many companies are still making PHP4. Although PHP 5 has basically learned about java's object-oriented learning, however, it is not widely used in China. This requires a process.

* The development framework is inadequate and there is no powerful development framework. if you have tried Ruby On Rails, you will know what Rails has brought to developers, the natural MVC model, developers only need to write a small amount of Ruby code to complete very powerful functions. Although PHP has MVC-based php. MVC and event-driven PRodo development frameworks, development efficiency is much lower than ROR (Ruby On Rails.

* Lack of powerful universal database interfaces. although PDO (PHP Data Object) is built in PHP 5.1, there is already a layer like ActiveRecord in Rails, there is no need for programmers to think too much about database interaction, but to focus more on business processing.

* Lack of strong commercial support. Although PHP is a little bit of commercial support compared with Ruby, it is far from asp.net or JSP. This requires Zend to work harder in China.

No matter how many PHP deficiencies there are, it is still the favorite of many PHP developers, because it is concise, fast, easy to get started, simple syntax. Compared with Ruby, PHP syntax is very close to C/Java and other languages, so it is easier to learn a little.

I hope PHP China can do better in China and Zend will do better in China!