On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new post (technically a repost) of an article from Kevin Schroeder about using the job queue in the Zend Server software to enhance the functionality of your application.

When talking about building a scalable application there is a big concept out there that many PHP developers are not overly familiar with. That concept is queuing. It is becoming much more prevalent in PHP-land but the concept of a queue is still relatively unused among PHP developers. [...] Queuing a job is actually very easy to do. A job is run by calling a URL where that job resides. The Job Queue daemon will receive the request from your application and will then call the URL that you specified in the API call. Once you call that URL your application can continue going on its merry way to finish serving up the request.

He includes some code snippets showing how to create the request - in this case a simple call that will just email when the job is preformed. There's more than one way to do it and he includes a more well structured/less scripty way to do things in an abstract class.

Andi Gutmans (of Zend) has a new post to his blog about how he's truly and geekishly excited about the Zend Server 5 release.

Last week we released Zend Server 5 and it is another memorable moment for me. Not because the process of getting it out the door was all smooth (it sometimes felt like pulling teeth) or because it's a new major version of Zend Server.

He goes on to talk about the cod tracing feature of the new release (one of his favorite parts) and how it can really help developers trying to find those elusive bugs and see how things are working deeper inside their application. There's even a nice looking UI. You can find out more about Zend Server on the Zend website (including a link to download a free trial).

Kevin Schroeder (of Zend) has posted a new video to YouTube on how to get the latest version of Zend Server up and running on a linux machine in under five minutes (four minutes and thirty-seven seconds, to be exact).

He shows you how to:

• Download the server software for manual download
• Set up some basic configuration files
• Update the needed packages and dependencies (in his case RPMs)
• Grabbing a license from the request page on Zend.com
• Set up some of the configuration through the tool's web-based interface

You can find out more about the Zend Server product on its info page on Zend.com

In a new post to the Zend Developer Zone Jayson Maynard reminds you of some of the upcoming webinars from Zend that'll be happening this month. There's four of them in the list:

• Best Practices for Magento Development
• PHP Performance: Principles and Tools
• Zend Server for IBM i in Action
• Simpler Debugging, Better Performance: What's New in Zend Server 5.0

All events are free to attend, so if you're interested, click on the links above to get more information on the session and to sign up.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a new post talking about a webinar Zend is hosting showing you how they created a "software flight recorder" with the combination of Adobe Flex and PHP.

Tasked with building a software flight recorder for Zend Server 5.0 (the new release of its popular PHP web application server), Zend chose Adobe Flex. Join this webinar by Adobe and Zend to learn what made The PHP Company opt for Flex, see a live demo, and hear lessons learned from one PHP/Flex development project. You'll find out how Flex and PHP can be used together to enhance your application.

You can catch it at one of two times (or both if you really want to, I suppose) - February 3rd at 6am PST or February 4th at 9am PST.

They're free to attend, so stop by and see what the Zend Server software has to offer that could save you and your developers a lot of time and hassle in the future.

In a new post to his blog Matthew Weier O'Phinney takes a look at a pretty cool feature of the Zend Server tool - the ability to directly monitor your Zend Framework applications.

When keeping tabs on your ZF applications, it's often difficult to separate application errors from general PHP errors, and if you aggregate them in the same location as your web server errors, this can become more difficult still. [...] Zend Server's Monitor extension has some capabilities for providing more context, and does much of this by default: request and environment settings available when the error was logged, the function name and arguments provided, and a full backtrace are available for you to inspect.

You can also trigger custom events via the extension's API and, to make it even easier, they've created a new writer for Zend_Log - Zend_Log_Writer_ZendMonitor. He includes a bit of sample code showing you how to create an instance of the component and log a sample citical message.

As Chris Jones briefly mentions and this press release discusses in more detail, Zend and Oracle have joined together to make it even easier for those using Oracle to also use Zend Server as their platform.

This is a first step to making it easy for our customers and users to quickly deploy the Zend software stack without having to go to various websites, download various packages and install them. [...] We now host an rpm package on the ULN [Unbreakable Linux Network] servers called zend-server-repo which updates the Linux OS install to also look at the software repositories hosted by Zend. When a user wants to install Zend Server, just a simple command will install the zend-server product directly.

They've also added it as a package for those using the Oracle Enterprise Linuxyum-installable package. You can find out more of the technical details on the Oracle Technology Network.

Zend's press release can be found here.

On the PHP 10.0 blog today Stas points out some packages from Zend that are the source versions of the Zend Server platform:

I was asked about PHP going with Zend Server, specifically from which sources it is built - as we don't ship source packages for the builds. Since Zend Server includes PHP build that can have some patches applied from SVN past the release (i.e. if the package has version 5.2.10 it might have some patches that were in SVN 5.2 branch past 5.2.10 tag) - I think it is important that people know what they are going to run if the use Zend Server.

The two packages, php-5.2-source-zend-server and php-5.3-source-zend-server, can be installed just like any other rpm/deb package and will give you full access to the source of the latest Zend Server installation. There's no Changelog included yet, but it should be "Coming Soon" according to Stas.

New in the Zend Developer Zone today is this post looking at the Zend Server GUI and how you can extend it to add in data from the Data Cache API.

As the GUI of Zend Server is based on the open-source Zend Framework, you can easily extend it. This article demonstrates how to integrate new functionality to Zend Server which makes it possible see the content and some meta information of cached items. For this example I use the Data Cache API from Zend Server, but in combination with the Zend Framework component Zend_Cache and its Zend_Cache_Backend_ZendServer_Disk backend adapter.

He steps through the creation of a new Zend_Cache object and an implementation of the Zend_Cache_Backend_Interface as well as making the new tab for the data to live under in the GUI. The interface is dropped in place and a view and model is added and your end result can look like this.

Daniel Krook has taken a look at the Zend Server tool and has written up a post that's part description and part tutorial. He talks about features of the Server and offers some helpful hints for getting it up and running.

A few months back, Ed Kietlinski introduced us to the new Zend Server at a New York PHP meeting. I've since installed it on two of my department's servers and put together some notes on my experience.

He takes a look at what the Server is and what it has to offer, both for corporate and community projects. He also notes that it has hit the "sweet spot" in his group to provide an easy to maintain solution that gives them all the power and simplicity that a package-based too can provide. He spends the rest of the post showing a sample installation onto two CentOS servers (including the installation of DB2, Mail and PEAR).