I would like to tell you all about my ‘incredible’ experience with one of the new Zend Tools called ‘Zend Server’.  The experience was ‘so great’ that it took me six days to recover my self, if I tell you the truth guys, I nearly got into depression.

Have you ever experience a series of ‘impossible things’ that happened one after the other without any comprehension? Well, that happens to me with Zend Server CE.

I am currently running a MacOSX Snow Leopard on a 17 inch MacBook Pro for the development of my projects and I have the built in Apache, PHP 5.3.1, and MySQL 5.1 as a backend DB. I do work with Dreamweaber CS4 to develop the GUI interfaces together with PhotoShop and Fireworks (all from Adobe Creative Studio CS4) and use Eclipse modified for PHP and Javascript developments (it is free but Zend calls it Zend Studio, implements some gadgets here and there a voilá, a 400 dollars product) . To debug my client-side code I do have Firebug and that’s it.

If I tell you the truth everything was working fine, but I wanted to tweak a bit more the performance of my code (we all do that), so I checked the Zend Tool Zend Server CE. Its documentation was quite good and for the comments of the rest of the programmers I thought was worth a try. This is what happened:

  1. download and install Zend CE Server
  2. restarted my computer
  3. started Zend Server
  4. damn, nothing works here, nothing! my computer suddenly slows down, what is happening?
  5. looked at the processes, my God! mr Zend Server had five PHP opened at the same time as a service! And also a service controller that doesnt allow me to stop any of the Services!
  6. this is crap! how should i stop this? info: http://files.zend.com/help/Zend-Server-Community-Edition/mac_osx_installation.htm
  7. this info is even worst, where is installed? where all those scripts that the documentation is talking about? on the Applications folder (where is installed) there is nothing as what they are saying
  8. found it (have to view hidden files in my Mac, done -defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE) with a full Mac Search (thanks spotlight)
  9. uninstalling application
  10. restarted computer
  11. going to code a bit, going to Applications folder… diablo! my Finder crashes!
  12. found tones of info, none of them worked -.DStore, .launch Services, .Onyx, etc, reinstall Snow on top, not a fresh install… reboot, Finder still crashes
  13. building backups (Time Machine is quite old -a week?), whilst in the process… see next
  14. looked onto Apache XAMPP install (I do not use it anymore), what??!! htpdocs and all mysql databases GONE!
  15. i rund around my house screaming, yelling, and asking God why this is happening to me thousand times! -dont laugh, you probably did it a couple of times too
  16. Worked with Data Recovery, FileSavage, and some data recovery programs that didn’t help at all… where are all those files?
  17. last solution: fresh install Snow Leopard, Carbon Copy Cloner and TimeMachine working together for a scheduled daily backups.

Well, thank you very much Zend Server, you obviously helped me to improve the performance of my code as I had to rebuild all those libraries that weren’t backed up before making my code faster, cleaner and easy to implement and use… woaw, unreal.

Also, thanks Zend Server CE as I reinstall my OS, having only those apps that really are part of my development process and making me buy a 1.5 TB external drive to have all my backups saved daily. If it wasnt for you I wouldn’t bother spending my money on such things. You rock Zend Server!