I found an article hidden away on slashdot talking about how IBM has entered into a partnership with Zend Technologies, a leading provider of PHP development tools, in order to "help make PHP work better with corporate databases and web service technologies".

I have used PHP quite a bit over the years both on the work and home fronts. Almost every incarnation of this web site has been written in PHP, including this one (WordPress is written entirely in PHP). At work, I’ve used PHP to help manage data related to development and deployment processes that has been running for over three years with very little modification over the time its been in production. It’s very easy to write pretty solid code in an abbreviated amount of time using PHP.

PHP is a very powerful language, and it is very easy to get a highly interactive web site up very quickly. While I’ve never used the Zend development tools in order to perform any of this development, I’ve had very good experiences with the tool in general and I’m glad to see that it is finally going to get some backing from a pretty large corporate entity.

For one, it does something to validate the tool as valid corporate tool. Secondly, and probably more important to me, it validates the technology choice I made three years ago in order to get solid results as quickly as possible.

This should be a very interesting time for the PHP community. While they’ve had huge support from the Open Source community over the years, I’m interested to see how many companies start finding the PHP language a valid technology due to IBM’s backing.

Related Articles:

• Zend buffs up corporate open-source effort – news.com
• IBM, Zend Welcome Open-Source Developers – eWeek
• IBM Ups Open Source Efforts – Information Week