Zend Announces Industry-Wide PHP Collaboration Project at Its Inaugural PHP Conference

1 January 1970

Zend Technologies, the PHP company, today announced the PHP Collaboration Project at its inaugural PHP conference and expo. The project is an open source initiative through which the PHP community and partners will together create an industrial-grade, de facto standard PHP Web application development and deployment environment. The Project's first two open initiatives are:

-- Zend PHP Framework: A Web application framework which will standardize
the way PHP applications are built. The Zend PHP Framework will
accelerate and improve the development and deployment of
mission-critical PHP Web applications

-- Engagement with the Eclipse Foundation: Zend is joining the Eclipse
Foundation as a Strategic Developer. Zend is now proposing to lead a
project focused on PHP within Eclipse

Zend's PHP Collaboration Project involves the participation of the open source community and a growing group of Zend partners and customers, together building a robust PHP development and deployment environment. Initial Project participants include: IBM, Oracle, MySQL, Intel, Actuate, ADP, FileMaker, Schematic, StepUp Commerce, OmniTI, 100days.de, SugarCRM, bebe.com, 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," declared Doron Gerstel, CEO of Zend Technologies. "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 open source Zend PHP Framework and Eclipse-based development environment initiatives, combined with PHP's exceptional ease of use, will transform the way Web applications are developed and deployed."

Zend is working with the PHP community and independent software vendors (ISVs) to develop the open source Zend PHP Framework project. This framework is designed to bring extreme simplicity, an open standard, a friendly license and a structured development process all leading to a uniform code base for next-generation Web applications.

"PHP's simplicity can ease adoption and reduce complexity and cost for corporate developers," said Rod Smith, IBM Fellow and vice president of the company's emerging software technology group. "We look forward to collaborating with the PHP community and Zend to further accelerate PHP as a leading paradigm for assembling next-generation Web enabled business applications that broaden solutions that IBM delivers to customers."

"As a committed leader and supporter of innovation of all kinds, Intel welcomes the PHP Collaboration Project as a new paradigm for PHP application development and deployment," said Jon Bork, Director of Intel's 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."

Zend also announced that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation and its ISV community as a Strategic Developer. Within the Foundation, Zend will propose to lead a new PHP project, conveying world-class expertise on dynamic languages to Eclipse. Zend's participation with Eclipse will benefit participating businesses by delivering the extreme simplicity of PHP to the active and established Eclipse development platform. In addition, the PHP community and its customers will benefit from the Zend/Eclipse partnership through improved access to the Eclipse open source development platform and its vibrant ecosystem.

"Actuate was the first Business Intelligence vendor to deliver open source reporting solutions through its partnership with Eclipse," said Mark Coggins, senior vice president of engineering at Actuate and Eclipse Foundation board member. "We are looking forward to our participation in the new Zend open source initiatives. Our participation in the Framework and the Eclipse projects led by Zend will facilitate integration of our reporting solution. The initiative is a great opportunity for ISVs to play a part in providing customers with a comprehensive solution for building next generation PHP-based Web applications, which in Actuate's case translates into providing customers with a complete reporting solution for PHP."

About Zend Technologies, Inc.

Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications. Zend's founders are the architects of PHP, which is used by more than 22 million Web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic web applications. Deployed at more than 10,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Zend, headquartered in Cupertino, California, is privately held and venture funded with investments from Azure, Index, Intel Capital, Platinum, SAP Ventures and Walden Israel. For more information, please visit http://www.zend.com/, or call 1-408-253-8800.
Website: http://www.zend.com/