Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 11:07:40 -0700
From: "Sara L. Killingsworth" <saralk@home.com>
To: SaraLK@Home.Com
Subject: PHP 4.0

US Press Contact:	Sara Killingsworth
			Media Relations Counsel
			Zend Technologies, Ltd.
			Phone: 480-961-1515
			Fax:	480-961-2126
			SaraLK@Home.Com		FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PHP 4.0 Release Features Zend Engine
Quality Scripting Engine Revolutionizes PHP

Tel Aviv, Israel-May 22, 2000 - The PHP Association (www.php.net) has
announced the release of PHP 4.0, a significant accomplishment realized
by the international community of PHP developers. PHP is built around
the Zend Engine developed by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, co-founders
of Zend Technologies Ltd. The Zend Engine features a complete
restructuring of the way PHP processes code-though it features backward
compatibility with PHP 3. Zend Technologies remains committed to
continuing improvements on the Zend Engine for the open-source PHP
development community.
	The Zend Engine speeds the performance of PHP 4.0, making it many times
faster than PHP 3. This performance benefit was accomplished by changing
the execution paradigm from an execute-while-parsing mode to a
compile-then-execute mode. 
	Users of the Zend Engine are impressed by the performance boost. "I
converted Keystone over to running the Zend (PHP 4.0) Engine, and saw a
huge jump in performance," said Stonekeep (www.stonekeep.com) Webmaster,
Dave Belfer-Shevett. "Now I recommend PHP 4 to everyone."
	"PHP is very widely used, both for Web development and for
database-driven applications," said Suraski. "We developed the Zend
Engine in order to speed up execution; but with more than two million
sites (Netcraft survey) and applications using PHP 3 today,
backward-compatibility was of primary concern. For almost all users, an
upgrade to PHP 4.0 won't require any changes to the PHP scripts. They
simply upgrade the server, and everything runs the same-just faster."
	Suraski and Gutmans have been part of the PHP open-source community for
several years, and are also members of the Apache Software Foundation.
PHP is the most popular module on Apache servers, which now comprise 60
percent of the servers on the market. Tens of thousands of downloads
from the PHP.net site occur monthly.
	PHP is a server-side scripting language for development of dynamic Web
pages and Web-enabled applications. One of PHP's greatest advantages is
its cross-platform support of many UNIX variants, Linux and Windows. PHP
can run as an Apache module or as a native ISAPI extension for IIS and
Zeus.
	 One of the most popular solutions available today for developing
dynamic Web sites, PHP offers excellent connectivity to most of the
common database interfaces (including Oracle, Informix, Sybase, MySQL,
PostgreSQL, ODBC and many others). PHP also offers integration with
various external libraries with utilities for everything from generating
PDF documents to parsing XML.
	Zend Technologies is a company, which develops and markets Internet
infrastructure software programs. In addition to offering proprietary
and revenue-generating products, Zend remains committed to the
advancement and proliferation of PHP as a freeware, open-source
scripting language. The company will continue to offer expertise and
technical backing to the PHP open-source community.  Much synergy exists
between the success of PHP as open source and the success of Zend
Technologies.
	Zend recently released the Zend Optimizer, the first in a series of
products for PHP developers. The Zend Optimizer, which works in
conjunction with PHP 4.0, uses multi-pass code optimizations to double
the running speed of PHP 4.0 applications. This is done by running
several optimization passes on the code created by the run-time compiler
before the code is executed. 
	For general information on Zend and  PHP, visit http://www.zend.com.
For an introductory tutorial on PHP, see http://www.php.net/tut.php
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