Zend Optimizer = Crap

So it's been a few weeks since Zend released their php 5.2 compatible zend optimizer and I'm finally getting around to installing it.

I came to find out very quickly that this is at the very least a buggy release, and it was clearly irresponsible of Zend to actually make the product available in it's current state. Zend Optimizer is required by many webmasters because a lot of people who create commercial products based on php use Zend's encoding utilities to make their source code un-viewable by their customers - and thereby protecting their intellectual property.

Of course, there was a big fiasco not too long ago where Zend's encryption was easily broken and source code for all kinds of software was made freely available. Zend released a more secure version shortly after, but the damage was done.

More recently, php released an upgrade that was very important because of security implications with the upgrade. People running zend optimized scripts were out of luck because the Zend Optimizer did not work with the secure release of php. They released the software at least 30 days beyond what any other accelleration/encoding platform was able to do, and lo and behold it segfaults with two of the most popular apps out there - vBulletin and MediaWiki!

They spell out in their forums there is a fix for this problem, and promise a release in the future, but no time frame for release is specified, so webmasters are basically either faced with the decision of running insecure sites or taking down sections of their sites that are reliant on encoded software.

With all of the problems, I'm very seriously considering a closer look at ionCube, but I have a set of reservations surrounding the use of that software as well (it's unlicensed for instance).

I can't tell you the number of times I've been disappointed with Zend over the years. Most of the time it is simply disappointment. Lately they've been unbelievably irresponsible with their product releases.