Zeev Suraski: The Future of Zend Engine and Zend Framework

In June 2015, the acquisition of Zend, the developer of the core of the PHP language , was announced by the American company Rogue Wave Software. In February 2016, co-founder and executive director Andy Gutmans announced her resignation from Zend . At this time, the second of the founders of Zend Technologies, Zeev Suraski, in his blog shared his plans.



Over the past 20 years, I have been at the forefront of developing Zend Engine, the “core” of PHP, both personally and through my team. Over the years, we have played a leading role in many of the key achievements of the language runtime environment, including the latest engine updates, which have been a breakthrough in PHP 7, and many others. We are very proud of this contribution, and I believe that it was crucial for the rapid spread of PHP in the past, and for maintaining its competitiveness in recent years. Other people from my team played leading roles in developing other important components in the PHP ecosystem, namely Zend Framework, Apigility and Zend Expressive, which are also used by hundreds of thousands of companies.

Over the past three years - after Zend was absorbed - we continued this work under the wing of the company Rogue Wave Software, for which I am very grateful to them. However, Rogue Wave recently made a strategic decision from the entire Zend project portfolio to focus its efforts on the Zend Server. As a result, I announce that my team and I - including Dmitry Stogov, Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Enrico Zimuel leave the company in search of new opportunities. This will not happen immediately, but the decision is made.

Since we are still very concerned about both PHP and the Zend Framework ecosystem, one of the options we are considering is finding a new home for these projects to provide a planned contribution to PHP 8 and further versions, as well as continue the development of ZF and Zend Expressive. One of the reasons for this announcement, which is far ahead of our actual departure date, is to explore these possibilities.

If you work for a company that, in your opinion, will be interested in supporting such aspirations, I will be glad to hear from you at zeev@php.net.

Update:
Similar posts from Enrico Zimuel and Matthew Weier O'Phinney .