Zend China: PHP's opportunities in China

Author: Heiyeluren
Date: 2005-9-9
Blog: Http://blog.csdn.net/heiyeshuwu

Zend Technologies is the official PHP sponsor, although PHP is an open source project, but development tools, training, certification, etc. are handled by Zend, because PHP core Zend API is provided by Zend company, so it can be said that Zend company is PHP support. At the beginning of this year, including IBM, Oracle and other international manufacturers to support PHP, further stimulated the development of PHP, how to go beyond other languages in Perl, Ruby, Python and other scripting languages, this becomes a Zend company an important task.

Rasmus Lerdorf, the founder of PHP, came to Beijing last October to train Yahoo, and I was guessing that PHP wanted to make a difference in China. At the beginning of this year, I heard that Zend company wants to expand the Chinese market, because in China, PHP language is also with the JSP, ASP and other Web development language, but has not been particularly strong support groups, only phpe.net, phpx.com and other civil society. But in the last six months, Phpe.net basically did not update, Php&more Magazine is also out of a period of no one, phpx.com What I think is limited to a lot of PHP beginners in the forum to ask questions, if the long-run, PHP developers will lose power, PHP in the country will also lose the market, especially the recent Ruby on rails such a powerful combination of attacks, Perl, The future of PHP is likely to lose the market.

However, so the world is not so simple, because Zend has formally prepared to enter the Chinese market, first of all, they launched this year September 1, a Chinese open source site: PHP China (www.phpchina.com). The homepage of this website is introduced as follows:
Phpchina is a public welfare, non-profit technology exchange website, a free platform for PHP enthusiasts, users to publish news, communication technology, a PHP China Alliance, the United States professional PHP Zend Company, PHP China promotion Skinova Company, as well as China's major portals, PHP Professional website full support PHP China official website.

In the country they first find cooperation is discuz, adopted their forum 4.0rc1,discuz should forget the domestic walk relatively early, and maintain a relatively long forum, many of the previously well-known forum has been silenced, now the rise is Discuz, phpwind and other forums, On the technical strength and user groups, Discuz is one of the first, Discuz adopt open source products and commercial products and the strategy, both to attract personal webmaster, but also to attract business users, so PHP China chose this horse a mature product.

In order to attract users to the forum of PHP China, they have adopted a lot of attractive means, such as:
In order to promote website construction, encourage members to participate actively, for the development of PHP in China to contribute to the PHP Alliance will discuss the decision, by Zend and Skinova Company sponsorship gifts, advanced members to the incentive activities.

Of course, these are only the first step in localization, in fact, the core is Zend to provide certification, training, development tools to provide a range of services is the key, these are only auxiliary role.

At present, most of the domestic use of PHP should be those doors, including Sina, Yahoo, Tom and so on, each company has its own very mature set of development framework, combined with smarty, PEAR, ADODB these extended class library, basic can meet the needs of enterprise architecture. However, in enterprise applications PHP is not doing enough to develop a fast development model like Ruby on Rails.

* Object-oriented mechanism is not sound, and now many companies are still making PHP4, although in PHP 5 has been basic Java of those object-oriented learning, but in the domestic use is not so extensive, which requires a process.

* Development framework is not sufficient, there is no strong development framework, if you have tried Ruby on Rails, then you will know what Rails brings to developers, the natural MVC pattern, developers can write very little Ruby code will be able to do a very powerful function. Although PHP has a development framework such as PHP.MVC based on the MVC pattern and event-driven Prodo, it is much less efficient than Ror (Ruby on Rails).

* Lack of a strong universal database interface, although in PHP 5.1 built-in PDO (PHP Data Object), but in rails have activerecord such a layer, there is no need for programmers to think too much about database interaction issues, Instead, focus more on the business process.

* Lack of strong business support, although PHP is a little bit more commercial support than Ruby, but with ASP. NET, JSP is far worse, this need Zend in China more company efforts

No matter how much PHP is lacking, it's still a favorite among many PHP developers because it's simple, fast, easy to get started with, and easy to syntax. PHP's syntax is close to C/java and other languages, and is easier to learn than Ruby.

Hope that PHP China to do better, I hope Zend Company to go all the way!

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