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The Zend Engine is an open source scripting engine (a Virtual Machine), commonly known for the important role it plays in the web automation language PHP. It was originally developed by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski while they were students at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. They later founded a company called Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel. The name Zend is a combination of their forenames, Zeev and Andi.

The first version of the Zend Engine appeared in 1999 alongside PHP version 4. It was written as a highly optimized modular back-end, which for the first time could be used in applications outside of PHP. The performance, reliability and extensibility of the engine played a significant role in increasing the popularity of PHP.

The current version of the virtual machine is The Zend Engine II and is at the heart of PHP 5. The source code for the Zend Engine has been freely available under the PHP 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.

[edit] See also

• Comparison of application virtual machines

[edit] External links

• Zend Engine Homepage
• The Zend Engine License, version 2.00

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