A lot of you were probably wondering about the recent announcements and discussions about the future of the PHP scripting language. You’ve probably heard the word ‘Zend’ at some point, a few shreds of information about new features and functionalities, and that’s about it. In this article I’ll try to lay out the way I see the future of PHP in its upcoming release, version 4.0.

Even though I hope that by now the answer to that is pretty clear (at least to people from the PHP community), the myths and pieces of misinformation that surrounded its announcement probably warrant yet another clear explanation.

Zend is a piece of software (component, in Microsoft speak), that implements a scripting language engine. Theoretically speaking, it’s not directly related to PHP. Practically speaking, the fact that it ‘happens’ to implement the very same language makes it the engine of choice for executing PHP scripts.

Before Zend, PHP was powered by three different engines. Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of PHP, has written the engines for the first two versions of PHP/FI (he actually wrote just about all of the other code that surrounded the engine for these versions). Towards the end of 1997, Andi Gutmans and myself have written a whole new engine that was later the base of PHP 3.0. The new engine introduced increased performance and reliability, a much more powerful and consistent language definition, and a highly extendible API. All of you, today, benefit from the features of this engine. The fact that I personally can no longer remember all of the SQL servers and 3rd party libraries that are supported by PHP demonstrates its tremendous success, not to mention the various awards and enormous positive feedback it has received.

Since PHP 3.0 introduced many new language features, and since it was a very stable development platform, people began writing complex PHP scripts and packages. Admittedly, PHP 3.0 wasn't designed to run complex scripts or packages that include a large number of files, in the sense that its efficiency dropped significantly as the complexity of the script increased. Recognizing this fact, Andi and I decided to try and design a new engine, that will provide high performance for complex scripts, without degrading the performance of short, simple scripts. That's how Zend was born.

Unlike any of the previous engines, which weren't really separate from the rest of PHP, Zend was designed as a standalone library, that can be easily reused in programs other than PHP. At this time, we have plans to incorporate Zend as a stored-procedure language in the free high-performance SQL server, MySQL. The fact that the code was written from the ground up to be portable not only across computer platforms, but also across different computer programs, makes this task feasible and doable in a reasonable amount of time.

Like its little brother, the PHP3 engine, Zend comes to solve several deficiencies in previous versions of PHP. First, and perhaps most importantly, it implements the same language as PHP 3.0, but does so in a much more optimized manner. Zend typically executes PHP3 scripts at anywhere between 3 to 200 times quicker. Considering you don’t have to change a single letter in your script, but simply install a new version of PHP – that’s a pretty important benefit. This benefit is by far most noticeable on extremely busy sites, or sites that implement complex logic in their PHP scripts. Zend plugins, that will be available separately, will allow even higher speed for sites that need to squeeze every last bit of performance.

Zend introduces several new language constructs (like foreach, class::method() calls, reference support and more), and also remedies the most annoying problems of the PHP3 engine (notably, nesting arrays within objects and vice versa; a true implementation of unset(); and more). For a full list of new language-level features or improvements, go to http://www.zend.com/, and select the New Features button.

In order to better understand how PHP relates to its engine (which is very similar to the relationship between a car and its engine), consider the following diagram:

As you can see, without the PHP modules and the wrapper layer, all you would have is a nifty scripting engine, but not something you can actually work with.

PHP 4.0 will not be only about performance and improved reliability. Quite a few additional improvements are scheduled for this release, and are in various stages of implementation. First, the PHP modules in the above diagram are scheduled to be much more modular than they were in PHP 3.0. While you would still have the option of compiling every module that comes with the PHP distribution as an integral part of PHP, in version 4.0, we intend to make it possible and easy to compile each module as a dynamic, loadable module, and selectively load every module you wish at runtime. The engine support for this already existed in PHP 3.0, but there was no standard and easy to use build process to build dynamic modules. This feature has already been mostly implemented by Stig Bakken.

Another major issue we intend to address in version 4.0 is the Web Server interface. Version 3.0 had 3 supported interfaces - standard CGI, Apache and fhttpd, Apache being by-far the most popular one. In this new version, the Web Server interface is going to be generalized in a way that would allow us to easily support additional servers, most notably ISAPI (for Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) under Windows NT) and NSAPI (for the various Netscape servers). The multithreaded implementations will make use of the new thread safe resource manager that we've developed for Zend (at this time, Zend and PHP's core are 100% thread safe as they use this manager; the various other parts of PHP are now being added thread safety). At this time, abstraction layer modules have been completed for Apache, ISAPI and CGI (yes, PHP now works natively as an IIS module, just as smoothly as it works as an Apache module).

Finally, Zend's new features allow extended support for 3rd party APIs, such as COM. A COM module will be included in the Win32 distribution of PHP 4.0, that enables full COM automation. Simply put, it means you'd be able to access COM/DCOM objects from PHP 4.0 just as easily as you access them from ASP, using a full object-oriented syntax. Note that Zend's core does not have any dedicated COM support, thus, other OO interfaces, such as CORBA, may be also supported in the future, provided someone writes a support module for them.

To summarize, PHP 4.0 will not only be much quicker and reliable than PHP 3.0, it'll also be more modular, portable and feature-rich.

Zend has been recently feature-frozen and finalized, and is now going through a closed internal beta test. An alpha of PHP4 that uses Zend is being used and is based for further PHP 4.0 development of the additional features mentioned above. Assuming we won't bump into any unexpected striking issues, I expect the first public beta of PHP 4.0 to be released in late June or early July 1999.

--Zeev