Mark Driver

Bring unto ZendCon your PHP geeks — or is the proper term nerd?  I forget.  I suppose geek has a strong carnival sideshow connotation but nerd has always sounded too wimpy for my taste.  My personal preference is geek (geek emeritus in my case) In any event, I digress.

I spent this last Tuesday in San Jose CA at ZendCon. If you know PHP you know Zend. It’s the major (and the only one of any significant size) commercial force behind PHP.  Given that PHP has roughly 4 million developers worldwide (including part timers), this may seem a little odd but Its a testimony that successful open source communities can and do exist with limited commercial support. 

There has at times been some friction between the core PHP community and the folks at Zend but this stress seems to have abated in recent years — cheers to both sides for that. 

Today Zend provides a variety of middleware solutions and tools that optimize PHP solutions for mission critical work loads. 

At the conference Zend announced a new partership with Adobe to better integrate PHP with Adobe Flex.  Flex is a emerging force in emerging rich Internet application (RIA) tools; I first wrote about RIA’s back in 2005 and the concept is finally catching on with developers.  Its good to see PHP aligning itself with a solid RIA solution; it should definitely help keep it in the forefront among next generation web solutions.

Zend also announced version 6.1 of its IDE.  Zend Studio is an excellent tool for PHP developers and the move to Eclipse will prove to be a smart one over the next year or so.

The other major theme seemed to be a focus on the new version of the Zend Framework (1.6).  This framework certainly isnt the first or the only one available for PHP developers; but I do think it has a strong opportunity to grab the requisite market share to create momentum and consolidate IT centric developers around some common best practices.  This is technology that I’ll watch closely over the next year or so.

So PHP is alive and prospering.  While some industry hype may have shifted to emerging Ruby and Python momentum, PHP remains the technology of choice for a sizable majority within the web developer community.