Coomey.net

Somehow I missed this news back when it was announced, but Zend (the PHP Company) has announced the PHP Collaboration Project. The aim of this project is to leverage the power of some really big hitters in the IT world (IBM, Oracle, Intel and others) to drive PHP into the enterprise market and the future. If there is one trend when it comes to PHP (as well as other open source web app languages like Ruby), it is that it has been seeing steady uptake in the enterprise, by leaps and bounds over the last few years. Look out .Net and J2EE.

The most interesting development from this project I think is the announcement of a forthcoming Zend PHP Framework. What's a framework do you ask? Simply put, a framework is a re-usable set of code, or library, that is engineered to perform the common tasks that almost all web apps do like database connectivity, ldap directory searches, security, user management, etc. For instance, I've created several apps using PHP at work. All of them do these common things, and I had to re-write or re-tool the same code over and over again. With a framework, I've got this stuff already built to begin with. I don't have to worry about the plumbing, framing and infrastructure of an application, I just have to build the house around it.

Sure there are lots of PHP frameworks out there like PRADO, Symfony and others. I myself was seriously looking into using the absolutely fantastic, enterprise-grade Cerebral Cortex framework. (The maintainer, Davey Shafik has since stopped development of Cortex and has moved to the Zend PHP Framework team. Congrats, Mr. Shafik!)

The future is bright for the PHP community. Hang on to yer hats.