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BURLINGAME, Calif.—Zend Technologies, creator of the open source PHP web development platform, introduced Wednesday a new industry-wide collaboration project to standardize development on the fast-growing platform.
The Zend PHP Collaboration Project is an open source initiative through which the PHP community and Zends corporate partners will create an industrial-grade, de facto standard PHP Web application development and deployment environment, said company co-founder and CEO Doron Gerstel.
Gerstel said the projects first initiative will be to carve out a universal Zend PHP framework in order to standardize the way all PHP applications are built.
“This will accelerate and improve the development and deployment of mission-critical PHP Web applications,” Gerstel said.
Zends second action within the new project involves a new partnership with the Eclipse Foundation, maker of a popular open source software development toolkit.
Zend has joined the foundation with “strategic developer” status and is now preparing to head up a PHP-focused project within the Eclipse community, Gerstel said.
The Zend PHP Collaboration Project involves the participation of the open source community and a growing group of Zend partners and customers, including IBM, Oracle, MySQL, Intel, Actuate, ADP, FileMaker, Schematic, StepUp Commerce, OmniTI, SugarCRM and Marco Tabini, publisher of PHP Architect Magazine.
“With more than 40 percent of all Web applications running PHP, PHP has already proven itself as an industrial-grade dynamic language,” Gerstel said.
“Now, with the community and our partners, we are collectively taking PHP to the next level by leading open source projects based on de-facto standards.”
The Zend PHP Framework project is designed to bring simplicity, an open standard, a friendly license and a structured development process all leading to a uniform code base for next-generation Web applications, the company said.
“PHPs simplicity can ease adoption and reduce complexity and cost for corporate developers,” said Rod Smith, IBM Fellow and vice president of the companys emerging software technology group.
“Intel welcomes the PHP Collaboration Project as a new paradigm for PHP application development and deployment,” said Jon Bork, Director of Intels Open Source Program Office.
“We believe this initiative will be a positive catalyst to help propel the open source community to new levels of innovation.”