Zend announces enhanced long-term support policy for PHP

CUPERTINO, USA: Zend, the PHP Company, is enhancing its official Long-Term Support (LTS) policy for PHP, enabling users to confidently continue using a given major version of PHP - for instance, PHP 5.3 - for more than five years after its initial release date.

This adds an additional 2 years (40 per cent) to the life cycle of a major PHP version, after its end of support from the open source PHP community. This extended support for the PHP runtime is available for Zend Server customers via a Long-Term Support release of Zend Server that includes support and security hotfixes both for Zend Server and the PHP runtime included in it.

By extending PHP version support for a period exceeding five years, Zend enables users to secure long-term value from their mission-critical production environments.

According to Ido Benmoshe, Zend's VP of Global Services: "Migrating stable production applications to newer PHP versions is often challenging for IT organizations due to cost, time investment, and a desire not to impact the stability of a working application. This has created a support gap as many business apps stay in usage beyond the open source community's end of life for a given PHP version."

"As PHP becomes ever more widely used for mission critical purposes, more and more enterprises are faced with the challenges of maintaining a secure and compliant application environment while minimizing disruptive migrations," said Zend CEO & Co-founder Andi Gutmans. "Zend Server is now liberating IT departments from that difficult choice, and providing them the flexibility to use the power of PHP on their own terms."

The New Zend Server 6.3

This upcoming new release of Zend Server, available later this month, will support production environments on three major versions of PHP: 5.5 (supported for the first time), 5.4, and 5.3. Zend Server 6.3 will provide Long Term Support for PHP 5.3, fully supporting that runtime version for three more years, until February 2017.

Zend Server 6.3 is a platform designed to enable the Continuous Delivery of applications. Throughout every phase of the application delivery cycle, Zend Server enables continuous integration, release and infrastructure automation, and application management.

The New Zend Studio 10.6

Zend is also announcing the release and immediately availability of Zend Studio 10.6, enabling smarter PHP application development. Key improvements include:

* Full support for PHP 5.5

* More intelligent project processing

* An improved debugging experience

* Improved Git integration