With the recent release of the Zend Server CE (Community Edition) software from Zend, several PHPers around the community have been trying it out and posting some of their experiences. Brandon Savage has posted some of his thoughts on the release as he tried out the Mac OS X version.

There are many good things in this product. Among them, is the ability to easily activate and deactivate most of the plugins and extensions that come bundled with PHP by default. [...] Unfortunately, the problem also contains many what I would call "bugs" or usability enhancements that are simply not there.

A few of the things that made his bad list included: a lacking install process (too long?), the lack of an obvious logging tool and a different sort of checking for setting directives (a check against a regular expression?)

He found some good in the release too - the easy to install extensions, the number of extensions it comes bundled with and the inclusion of MySQL with the stack. He notes he won't be abandoning his typical install (like MAMP/XAMPP) over this tool - at least not for right now.