Zend signs PHP accord with Microsoft

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Tuning up for Windows Servers

Zend Technologies and Microsoft are to improve performance of PHP on Windows 2003 Server and its planned successor, Longhorn Server.

PHP specialist Zend will fine-tune deployment of PHP on Windows Servers, with changes made to the open source language submitted to the community.

An Internet Information Services (IIS) add-on, FastCGI, is planned from Microsoft that will serve as an interface between PHP and IIS Web Server. A "production-quality" PHP runtime is also planned for versions of IIS found in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Longhorn Server. The companies also plan regular testing and joint participation in the open source community.

Microsoft and Zend announced their partnership today at Zend's PHP Conference and Expo in San Jose, California.

Zend is the latest open source specialist to work with Microsoft on improving performance between Windows and its chosen specialized technology. Such deals are a recognition by the open source community of the importance to their users of Windows. They also mark icrosoft's acceptance of the allure of open source applications and middleware for Windows developers. Microsoft has signed deals with JBoss, SugarCRM and MySQL.

Microsoft's decision to tune PHP for Windows comes up to two years behind similar moves by IBM and Oracle on databases, Intel on hardware and SAP.

Updating its partnership with IBM, Zend today announced Zend Core for IBM 1.5. The suite features integration with DB2 Express 9 Datacenter and Informix Dynamic Server, pure XMLTM support in order to manage XML data, and connection pooling to share server resources among clients.

Zend Core is designed to simplify development and installation of PHP with databases from IBM and Oracle. Continuing the database theme, Zend announced planned integration with its open source peer MySQL.

Also announced by Zend is version 5.5 of its Zend Studio IDE. Features include integration with Java, support for the Zend development framework, and improved source code management. New to the Zend family is ZendBox, a hosted, managed server running PHP 5 and combining hardware and operating system and optimized to help companies save time and money building and deploying PHP applications.

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