It’s one of several announcements being made at the company’s third annual user conference this week.
This is a very strategic move for us, said company co-founder Andi Guttmans. We’re seeing more of our customers building hybrid applications that leverage Java but use PHP for web development. By going with Eclipse, we can work with partners to bring side-by-side with Java development by using the same IDE.
The beta, code-named Neon, is Zend’s commercial product that builds on the Eclipse PHP tools project that it has lead, and from which it has drawn significant IBM contribution. That is, while you can get bare bones PHP tooling by downloading it from Eclipse, Neon will add features like editing, debugging, analysis, optimization and database tools. Zend expects the finished product, Zend Studio for Eclipse, to ship in the first quarter of next year.
Also in the pipeline is release of the next version of Zend Core, the company’s supported distribution of the PHP language. New features in Zend Core 2.5 include improved support for high-availability clustering.
Additionally, Zend is making several joint announcements with IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, respectively.
It includes single source support for PHP on DB2, plus support of IBM’s DB2 Connect technology to access i5/OS and z/OS servers, where Zend will handle level 1 calls while escalations go to IBM.
For Microsoft, Zend is announcing the next step in a relationship first disclosed a year ago to improve Zend performance on Windows Servers. Last fall, Zend tuned its performance on Windows; this year, Microsoft has followed up with FastCGI, an interface between PHP and the IIS webserver that boosts performance, released as a GoLive option that is a pre-release which Microsoft officially supports. In turn, Zend if offering PHP support for Windows Server 2008 Core Option, which is a stripped down version of Windows Server optimized for web servers.
Finally, Zend is announcing that Oracle is releasing connection pooling technology for PHP against its databases. A feature that Oracle has been developing for two years, connection pooling provides PHP parity with Java, which otherwise has its own pooling mechanism as part of J2EE/Java EE 5.
Our View
Guttmans points to the joint announcements with the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle as proof positive that the household names are taking the company seriously as the de facto commercial technology provider for the open source PHP language.
The announcements are acknowledgements of the growing popularity of PHP as an easy-to-use, dynamic scripting language for Web 2.0 apps. And they are also reflections of business decisions that if a technology is here to stay, that you’ll need at least one official throat to choke.
