Zend Announces General Availability of Z-Ray for PHP, WordPress, Drupal, Magento

Provides Real-time Debugging and Optimized Productivity with Newest Certified PHP Stack

CUPERTINO, Calif., Jan. 13, 2015 -- Zend, the PHP Company, today announced the immediate availability of Z-Ray, the ultimate PHP debugging and productivity solution for real-time visibility into PHP application and framework code. Z-Ray's "X-Ray vision" inside PHP requests also encompasses several common applications and frameworks including WordPress, Drupal and Magento. Z-Ray, included within the developer-centric Zend Server 8, offers unprecedented, in-context visibility inside apps, showing exactly what happens to construct each page. Z-Ray empowers developers to quickly write and deliver quality code, detect and fix issues earlier, and collaborate with operations staff to resolve production problems faster.

"Z-Ray empowers developers to create quality applications, giving them 'application awareness' from initial coding through final deployment. Developers, with Z-Ray's X-Ray-like goggles, see how their code is running as they develop it," said Zeev Suraski, CTO and co-founder, Zend. "Z-Ray's real-time insight allows for early error detection and correction, resulting in fewer production issues and better application performance in the end."

Z-Ray features and highlights include:

• Under-the-hood debugging capabilities
• Z-Ray Live! for mobile and APIs
• Application support for WordPress, Drupal, and Magento
• Framework support for Zend Framework, Symfony and Laravel
• Additional app and framework support via Z-Ray extensibility API
• Production snapshots

Z-Ray: Debugging for Error-free, High-Performing Applications

The new Z-Ray gives developers deep insight during development, drastically improving the quality and performance of their code and applications by resolving issues long before production. Z-Ray displays all under-the-hood details and PHP requests involved in building a page. It provides critical information on page requests, performance metrics, database query insight, session data and more.

Z-Ray Live! for Mobile and APIs

For mobile app debugging, Z-Ray Live! delivers information on requests originating from native mobile clients and API calls. This allows developers to see into the server-side execution of mobile app requests.

Unique Insight into WordPress, Drupal, Magento

Z-Ray provides visibility into application specifics such as Magento Blocks, Events, Handlers, and Requests, Drupal Functions, Modules, Blocks, WordPress Cache Objects, Crons, Plugins, Zend Framework Config, Events, Modules and much more.

Z-Ray Support for PHP Frameworks

Developers can use Z-Ray to gain insight into their Zend Framework, Laravel or Symfony-based PHP applications with information on requests, response objects, events, view helpers, config and app config as well as lists of loaded modules, and more.

Also, developers can easily create their own customized view in Z-Ray with the new Z-Ray Extensibility API to support any framework or application.

Production Snapshots

The new URL Insight closely examines critical URLs, identifying the slowest, poorest-performing, and most popular URLs. Full Z-Ray snapshots for these URLs provide unprecedented insight into what real-world requests coming from real users look like.

New Zend Server 8 for Boosted Performance

In addition to Z-Ray, Zend Server 8 delivers a fully-integrated application platform for mobile and web applications based on the only certified PHP stack. It provides real-time monitoring features, increased Web server and application performance, a new easy-to-use interface, higher application availability, scalability and clustering.

Availability and Pricing

Z-Ray is available with Zend Server 8 now on Linux x86 and x86-64, Mac OS X, Windows x86 and x86-64.

Zend Server 8 development environment starts at $20 per month, or 3 cents an hour on Amazon Web Services. A free 30-day trial is available: http://www.zend.com/products/server/downloads

For more information on Z-Ray, visit: 
http://www.zend.com/en/products/server/z-ray

For more information on Zend Server 8, visit
http://www.zend.com/en/products/server

Testimonials and References:

"Z-Ray has simplified my development processes with its immediate access to $_SESSION and database queries. Being able to view memory usage and execution time information ensures that I keep efficiency in mind all the way through the development process. It's a must-have tool!" – Rob Allen, Owner at Nineteen Feet, Ltd.

"Z-Ray is a game-changer for me – it makes all the important information immediately available for me, like function call lists, errors/logs etc. It really helps that it shows the proportions of execution time used by PHP/DB/IO/Network, and how memory is used. It provides a great summary of what is going on when a page is requested." – James Titcumb, Development Manager at Protected.co.uk 

"Z-Ray will save us a great deal of time from start to finish of a project - we now have the page development information where it should be, right there with the content we want to present.  It is a very cool tool!" - Larry Nies, President at NSC, Inc.  

"Z-Ray has the functionality I want. It provides an easy-to-use tool for seeing the SQL queries and PHP functions on each request. This will help our developers' productivity." - Jason Evans, Enterprise Architect at CDS Global

"Using Zend Server Z-Ray is akin to wearing X-Ray goggles, effortlessly giving developers deep insight into how their code is running as they are developing it – all without having to change any of their habits or workflow. With Z-Ray, developers can immediately understand the impact of their code changes, enabling them to both improve quality and solve issues long before their code reaches production. In addition to the obvious benefits of this 'Left Shifting' – better performance, fewer production issues and faster recovery times – using Z-Ray is also downright fun!" - Zeev Suraski, CTO and co-founder of Zend

"Z-Ray has proved to boost development productivity by providing developers immediate access to database queries, memory usage, request execution details and more. However, our customers told us they now needed to get this debugging info for their mobile applications. Z-Ray Live!'s new X-Ray vision offers 'as-it-happens' insight into each request coming from native mobile apps or via web services API calls. This real-time server-side error-catching and debugging helps developers stay one step ahead in the mobile app development process." - Zeev Suraski, CTO and co-founder, Zend

"Z-Ray gives developers deep insight into how their code is running as they are developing it – all without having to change any of their habits or workflow. With Z-Ray, developers can immediately understand the impact of their code changes, enabling them to both improve quality and solve issues long before their code reaches production. Z-Ray is the ultimate debugging solution. No developer should code in PHP without it!" - Zeev Suraski, CTO and co-founder of Zend

About Zend Technologies

Zend partners with businesses to rapidly deliver modern apps across mobile and cloud. Zend helped establish the PHP language, which today powers over 200 million applications and web sites. The company uniquely delivers a one-stop shop solution for developing, deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications. Zend continuous delivery is based on agile development, code protection, release automation, server management, consulting, training, and PHP certification. Zend solutions are deployed at more than 40,000 companies, including BNP Paribas, Best Buy, GE, Prada and other leading brands worldwide. Learn more at www.zend.com.