Zend Technologies Ltd. is a world wide web infrastructure software company with headquarters in Ramat Gan, Israel and has offices in Japan, Germany and the United States.

Zend is best known for its founders Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski who, along with other Israeli graduates of the Technion and Rasmus Lerdorf, have created the PHP web programming language. The company's operations are currently centered around the development of products relating to the development, deployment and managment of business critical PHP based web applications.

The name "Zend" is a portmanteau of the names of its founders, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans.

In 1997, Zeev and Andi rewrote the parser behind Rasmus Lerdorf's PHP-FI. The result was released as PHP 3.

In 1998 they redesigned that parser completely, and named it the Zend Engine. PHP 4 was based upon the first version of the Zend Engine, and saw a fair amount of success.

The Zend Engine is still at the heart of PHP, with PHP 5 following the development cycle of ZE 2. The source code for the Zend Engine has been freely available under a BSD-style license since 2001; it is an open-source project, and there are now several programmers from all over the world who volunteer their time and skills to expand and improve the code base.

External links

• Zend Technologies
• PHP Website