Zend Z-Ray - How useful is it to developers?

Zend Z-Ray is an innovative technology that has been launched recently. It provides the developers with a comprehensive insight into how a code is running through the various development stages. All this can be done without even having to alter any habits or workflow. This toolbar includes all the details of a page request for every PHP script that is associated with building pages. The developers inject the Z-Ray into the response generated from the PHP app that appears right in front of your browser. The impact of the changes made in the code can be comprehended immediately. Thus, the developers can simultaneously solve the issues and better the quality of the product before the code reaches the production. This is called ‘left-shifting.’ In addition to this benefit, the use of Z-Ray also ensures enhanced performance, lesser number of development issues and faster recovery time. These are the primary reasons why this toolbar is so preferred by the developers.

Another USP of this toolbar is that the developers can access all kinds of necessary for making changes in the code without even having to touch their own source code. Let’s discuss this in further details. Tracking bugs is never an easy task. There are several coding errors and other issues related to functionality crop up when a code is analyzed. Several of these issues and bugs can be resolved quite easily. But there are irreproducible or elusive bugs that can disrupt a successful project despite the adequate endeavors from the developers. It becomes more difficult to handle when complex applications function erroneously. At this point, it is the experienced developers who have adequate knowledge about tools and analytical skill can recognize the main cause of trouble. With the Z-Ray technology identifying the miscreants has become quite easy.

It also offers outstanding visibility while executing a web request or transaction. This enables the developers to find out the root cause of problems quickly and from a single familiar location. This toolbar will allow you to see a breakdown of the transaction according to performance, alterations in the session data and superglobal variables, functions execution in database, syncs data with PHP runtime errors that are collected by the Zend Server. The best part is that all these actions are performed with no requirement to alter any configuration at all. There are several features or panels in this toolbar that help in ensuring better performance. One of the primary features is the Page Requests. This will inspect the requests sent from a page to the web server and overview their method, time, response and path. They might also retrieve the indication of the issues that had appeared while they were executed. If there are multiple requests then Z-Ray is able to filter the data and produce the results related to the requests only.

Another feature is the Monitor Events panel. Here the developers will find a list of events related to Zend Server that might have been triggered by the request. This helps in cautioning the developers about any kinds of errors, slow execution of requests, high memory uses, etc. The events are made clear by the Zend Server monitoring rules. As a result, more information about these will also be available in the Zend Server user interface.

Another panel present in Z-Ray is Errors and Warnings. This where the errors generated during the page request appears. The information about when they were created, types and other related error messages are displayed here. The important panel is the Execution Time and Memory Peak. The Execution Time is the place where the developers can see how a request breakdown has taken place. This helps in comprehending how the webserver has responded to the same request. Memory Peak shows how much memory has been consumed by such a request. The Database Queries have all the SQL queries that are result from the page request. If you are looking for the bound value or how long the query took to get response, this is where you will find all the information. In addition, the result of the query can also be found here.

PHP Functions panel is where the developers will find the functions that appear when the page request is made. Name, time spent in its functioning, number of times called, etc appear here. The panel for Variables is for viewing the Super Globals in the code.

While working on a constant delivery environment it is important that software is developed and is auto tested to ensure proper quality. Such a system also demands that the errors are fixed at a fast pace. Hence, it is necessary to balance time for fixing bugs and delivering new products. To maintain this balance, the Zend Z-Ray toolbar is of immense help to the developers. This would help you leverage the benefits of PHP certified professionals when hiring services of a custom PHP development company.

We provide PHP development services. If you would like to hire PHP programmers from us, we would be glad to assist you at Mindfire Solutions.