The problem is that BIRT needs to be started once, and only once, in any given process. Once it has been started up, then it is plain sailing to load reports and render them to HTML. The BIRT runtime should be kept around until the process shuts down.

Two problems came up with this approach - if each PHP process makes its own BIRT process any settings/current data will be wiped out and the BIRT instance would go away whenever the PHP script finishes. He found something that solves both of these problems - the Zero Global Context. Its a "storage area" that can contain just about anything. He used it to store the BIRT runtime until its told to finish and die off.

In this 5 minute podcast, Jon and Andi talk about a wide variety of topics. They touch on PHP Scalability, Web Services, Zend Framework and how Zend implemented the Lucene search engine in PHP.

Cal also mentions their discussion of the BIRT reporting functionality that is newly integrated with the Zend Platform product.

You can grab the full podcast here.

Zend Technologies, the PHP company, today announced the general availability of Zend Platform 3.0. Zend Platform 3.0 is the only PHP application server created specifically to support the management, performance, integration and scalability requirements of organizations that use PHP to run business-critical web applications. Zend Platform improves the end user experience with these web applications by enabling better application responsiveness, reduced application downtime, and richer functionality.

Updates from the previous version include:

• Support for PHP 5.2
• Zend Optimizer 3.2.3 and Zend Debugger 5.2.4 are included
• New servers: Performance Mangement Server, Integration Servers & Enterprise Server
• PHP Configuration Control enhancements
• Actuate BIRT Reporting integration
• and more [txt]