I started playing with Zend Server CE (Community Edition) today. It looks like a very promising product. My installation was less than simple, for one, I'm a fan of the PHP echo tags <?= "hello" ?>, which are off by default (not sure why since they're great for templates). I also had to change the MySQL configuration by symlinking my MAMP MySQL socket to /tmp/mysql.sock by running:
ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock
This is all probably because I (like most developers) have a broken system. I'm also running on a mac which means that disabled versions of PHP and MySQL are lurking around from the Leopard installation. I'd still like to see the folks at Zend start encouraging the Rails practice of symlinking the htdocs folder. The htdocs folder isn't well structured in the mac installation to accomodate an application folder sitting underneath it (e.g. /Applications/ZendServer/apache2/myapp/htdocs instead of /Applications/ZendServer/apache2/htdocs).
I also had to create a symlink in the public folder of my Zend Framework application to Zend server:
ln -s /Applications/ZendServer/gui/UserServer ZendServer
And because I user mod_rewrite, I had to setup a special exclusion in my existing .htaccess file in order to make sure that Zend_Server didn't get angry:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/ZendServer
RewriteRule !\.(js|ico|gif|jpg|png|css|pdf|mov|mp3|swf)$ index.php
The payoff? Integrated debugging and speed! I'll probably put together a video tutorial of sorts. The only bummer is that Zend Server doesn't have integrated vhost support. I'm also looking forward to running some Java classes through Java bridge (Hibernate perhaps?)
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Great write up of your use of Zend Server CE.. would really be interested in seeing your video tut.. I know this would mean ‘installing from scratch’.. but I think it would be a great help to the many developers, like myself, who would prefer to run Zend Server CE over MAMP Pro or the like, but are more design focused than server literate!
Thanks again.. I’ll check back and see what you put together..
I had some big gripes about the lack of mysql support, but I’ll be upgrading to snow leopard next week and I’ll see if I can get it working with the latest version