When Zend Server originally got released, all of about two weeks ago — I was pretty stoked at the prospect of having an easy-to-use development environment. I’ve had trouble getting a macports installation of a LAMP setup on my home iMac and my MacBook Pro, so I jumped right on the opportunity of a packaged setup. Admittedly, I was frustrated with the first release being completely packaged into the Applications directory like MAMP is (*puke*), but by-in-large a very successful first release in my mind.

Enter the new OS X Release Candidate. I stumbled across it at like 3am with work in the morning and decided, "Meh. What’s another hour not sleeping?" I was pleasantly surprised when noticing two of my complaints remedied: restructured installation and an integrated MySQL server. A full solution in a simple installation: yes, please. When it came time for me to start preparing the new server environment for ZFComponents, I figured why not try out the Debian package?

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not exactly pro in command line (see: Chris Burdick). I definitely know enough to handle most server administration (except mail) by myself, but it still takes me a little while to setup an environment from scratch. You know — installing all of the packages, configuration and finally deployment of an application. I host all of my stuff on Slicehost, so I pretty much get to do whatever I want within the confines of shared resources; so the installation of Debian Lenny went forward (upgrade from my previous Debian Etch installation). To my delight, the DEB package for Zend Server is supremely easy to get running.

Debian already comes setup with Apache2, so I was thinking I’d have to override it, but Zend Server happily slid in, using the existing Apache2 installation so all that was left to me was deployment. A quick checkout from the repository and my server is now online. It was beautiful… kind of like the planets aligning without a looming apocalypse in the distance. Given my experience with OS X installation, I was expecting the ports to be all out of wack so I ended up banging my head against the wall because I couldn’t connect to the server on port 10088… only to read the documentation and find, "Uses port 80." Oh… right… documentation: I forgot.

All-in-all, I’m obviously elated with my experience so far with Zend Server. It’ll probably end up replacing our existing development environments later this year here at Purple, Rock, Scissors when PHP 5.3.0 drops so I don’t have to concern myself with killing an entire day updating people’s machines. If you’re a PHP Developer and haven’t tried it out yet, you probably should go ahead and give it a spin.