Zend

Context: PHP, programming languages, web servers

Zend (or more properly, Zend Technologies Limited) is the company devoted to providing commercial support to the PHP server-side scripting language. Their major product is the Zend Engine, which is the scripting engine behind PHP.

They also provide products that are generally useful for commercially-oriented PHP developers. These include:

• a PHP cache that increase the performance of the web server
• a byte-compiler that compile PHP scripts into bytecode, not so much for optimisation purposes, but for hiding source code
• an IDE
• a code optimiser

Of course, all these things cost money, something that open source developers may not have. Then again, I don't think open source developers would require some of the Zend's products anyway.

Zend (?), n. [See Zend-Avesta.]

Properly, the translation and exposition in the Huzvâresh, or literary Pehlevi, language, of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian sacred writings; as commonly used, the language (an ancient Persian dialect) in which the Avesta is written.

© Webster 1913.