Unofficial Response to Zend Rants
While this is not an official Zend blog, and it is definitely not my role at Zend to do marketing (thank god), I couldn’t avoid commenting on this post at Tony Bibbs’s blog, even if just to clear out my own team members and colleagues from any speck of evil-doing-corporation guilt.
Zend is a software company - as such, we make tools and recommend installing them in a certain way. Yes - in order to use server debugging, you need a server running with the Zend Debugger module. Yes - the only “official” way to do that is to install Zend Platform on your server (BTW, it does not require Zend Core as published). However, this does not mean that we hide any facts from our users / customers / community that we depend on so greatly. We are just following what any company would do - and that is publish official guidelines to how our products should be installed.
I work for Zend’s Global Services team, which includes support. I spend most of my office time supporting
customers, and I know each and evrey one of the support team members personally. If Tony would have
contacted support (which according to his post I understand he didn’t) he would get a straight, technical
answer, telling him that yes, you can simply take the debugger .DLL or .so and load it directly, and that
would work perfectly. We never made any attempt to hide that - considering the fact that anyone who looks
at his php.ini will find out sooner or later anyway 
Despite the fact that we try to make our living from selling commercial software, we are not a
hide-it-from-your-users kind of company.
Obviously this should have been posted as a response to Tony’s post - but apparently I can’t register at his site. Maybe his mailer is broken or something.
* REMINDER: The opinions expressed here are personal, and do not represent Zend Technologies (or any other third party) in any way.
Update: I just got some words of correction from colleagues at Zend: It seems that Windows users do need to install Core in order to get debugging running, because of dependencies between Zend Platform for Windows and Zend Core. While I’ve posted this a while back, I don’t want to mislead people who find this post looking for answers. I made the mistake of thinking about Linux only, which is of course wrong because it seems most people use Windows as their development platform.
In any case it seems that Zend is also working on improving the installation hassle on Windows - nothing official yet but there is hope, even for Windows users