Zend LaunchPad Review - The Quality Assured PHP (
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Overview
The core of the Zend Launchpad is really the Quality assured version of PHP that
they ship with it. This means that the folks at Zend have gone through and stress
tested the version of php shipped with the Launchpad, made sure no major bugs
exist, and that the product is ready for a production environment.
Comments
I see this from two perspectives really. The first as the employee of businesses
who really need some company putting a Quality Assurance stamp on PHP. From this
perspective, I think the Quality assured version of PHP makes the Launchpad worth
its weight in gold. When you have a company backing and giving support for their
distributed version of a product, it makes it easier for the big companies to
adopt those products which is great. Not only that, but it seems as if the Zend
folks are contributing their bug fixes back to the php community which makes it
a win-win situation for everybody.
The second position I see this as is as a developer of PHP. From this view I
find it very annoying. Number one the PHP project has a quite large quality assurance
team, working to make PHP as bug free as possible. Secondly, I find the effort
to bundle a Zend Quality Assured version of PHP to be a little insulting to the
people who work to create PHP. I could see freezing a version of PHP and then
distributing that version of PHP, free to customize and maintain. But they don't
distribute the whole of PHP, just the parts that they consider to be "stable".
I don't happen to like that approach, it almost seems like Zend is taking all
the credit for PHP and not really acknowledging that their quality assured version
of PHP is a 100% the work of the PHP community.
Improvements?
What would be great to see in the future is Zend going and distributing all of
PHP with their product, not just the extensions that they consider to be worthwhile.
I'd also like to see them provide a comprehensive credit listing of all the people
who actually contributed to PHP and who work to make PHP possible, something to
show that Zend realizes PHP is not their show, but rather the work of a large
open source community.
Overall
Overall, I'd say the product is a valuable contribution to PHP because it will
definetly help PHP gain more viability among commercial markets. While I would
like to see more extensions bundled with the custom PHP, and any easier method
to install other, new extensions. All and all I think the product is very valuable.{mospagebreak title=The Online Configuration
and Development Arena}
Overview
Once the Zend Launchpad installs the QA'ed version of PHP it also installs the
Zend Launchpad configuration tool. This tool will assist you in your php development,
including, quality assurance reports on the bundled PHP modules, a php.ini editor
and a snapshot of the php documentation (more up-to-date documentation is available
at http://www.php.net/manual/).
Comments
Overall this interface provides a good start, and its a smart idea, but it needs
some improvent before it can reach its overall potential. First of all, the meat
of the interface is the configuration program, which, while it is nice, is not
really that much different than using
vi to go into your php.ini file and change the values. The configuration is a nicety,
but shouldn't be such a large part of the online management interface.
The Quality Assurance reports are nice, but not complete enough, its seems like
there is more than one line about the quality assurance performed on the modules.
I want complete tests not just "well, the module's stable, it has these two known
bugs". Plus only a small subset of PHP's extensions are listed, if the Launchpad
came with all the extensions, or at least a larger subset of them
The Launchpad interface also includes the PHP manual bundled along with it, which
you can browse and read. Having integrated manual browsing is also a big bonus,
as it means you don't have to worry about installing the php manual on your local
machine and provides a good search interface.
However, these are all niceties, the Launchpad online interface, while it does
have some goodies, is not yet, in my opinion, mature. It still lacks some essential
features, such as the ability to add external extensions to your php build, or
be able to automatically upgrade your Launchpad version from the Launchpad itself.
The Launchpad Online interface is missing a great deal of these features, while
it shows promise, it looks like the people at Zend just decided to skimp on the
feature set for this first version.
