In case you haven't noticed, PHP is taking over your world. What started in 1995 as Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter (PHP/FI) has grown to become the server-side scripting language of choice for an estimated 20% of the internet as a whole and 40% of the Web scripting market. A lot of this success comes from the fact that, in addition to being a pretty damn good language, PHP is and has always been open source.

So what's the deal between IBM and Zend, the founders and architects of PHP? Why would Big Blue be interested in one of the darlings of the open source movement? More importantly, how does this affect database and Web developers?

Backstory
In February 2005, IBM announced a partnership with Zend Technologies to create "Zend Core for IBM", an out-of-box PHP solution that integrates seamlessly with Cloudscape and DB2. Zend Core, slated for release in the second quarter of 2005, promises to simplify the creation of PHP applications so that coding becomes only as complicated as it needs to be to get the job done.

In forming the partnership, IBM and Zend have two complementary goals.

1. Extend the renowned simplicity of PHP to enterprise developers.
2. Beef up that simplicity with enterprise-level functionality, but keep it unobtrusive so that developers can use what they want and ignore the rest.

Either way, enterprise developers are getting the love with this deal. According to the Zend Core for IBM technical roadmap, Zend Core will focus on two emerging trends in web development: "Do-it-yourself infrastructure" (DIY) and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA).

It's All About the Content
DIY can be described as a shift away from all-encompassing, scalable, Big Vision projects toward focused, "just get it done" Web apps that serve to accomplish a single or limited set of tasks. They promote the content rather than the technology, the smooth flow of information for the purpose at hand rather than expansive and often superfluous functionality.

The popularity of wikis and blogs exemplifies the growing pluralism of DIY infrastructure. No longer the domain of Web coders, content now pours forth from the non-tech masses as well.

Along these lines, SOA further emphasizes the content by de-emphasizing original code used to manage that content. Through the growing use of Web services and SOAP, distributed architecture allows developers to create "loosely coupled" interface definitions, connections that can expand and breathe without breaking. Through this type of code sharing, applications become more powerful without becoming more unwieldy.

By embracing these two movements, IBM and Zend appear to be leveraging the populism of PHP and taking it to the next level for everyone from individual coders to large enterprise teams. Coders win by focusing their talents. And the market wins by having a far greater participatory role than was possible in the past.

This actually continues a strategy that's been unrolling for several years now, in which IBM has embraced various open source technologies such as Linux, Apache, Derby, and Eclipse. In fact, last January, IBM pledged 500 of its patents to the open-source movement to encourage innovation. They even have an entire section of developerWorks, their developer site, dedicated to open source technologies.

What Zend Core Means to DB2 Developers
When Zend Core is released, which should happen as a free download on the DB2 and Cloudscape sites as well as developerWorks and on the DevX DB2 and Cloudscape portals, life for developers promises to become much easier. While IBM already offers a huge amount of support for PHP via developerWorks, developers have still had to grapple with the basics of installation and configuration. Most open-source software is not, admittedly, a single-button install.

With Zend Core, however, developers should benefit from:

• rapid setup of the PHP server;
• PHP 5, with native support for XML and Web Services;
• bundled Cloudscape (a small footprint, open-source RDMS);
• bundled libraries for DB2 UDB, as well as a smooth migration path from Cloudscape due to consistent APIs;
• frequent bug and security patches, all made available to the open source community.

With version 4, PHP added "Unified ODBC," which sought to create consistent database interfaces so that the back-end database could be changed when needed without significant code rewrites. PHP 5 takes that further with PHP Data Objects (PDO), a beta of which was released in February 2005. PDO allows for a consistent, object-oriented syntax for use with multiple database drivers, such as IBM Cloudscape, IBM DB2 Universal Database, Firebird/Interbase, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, ODBC, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQLite.

In addition, IBM is planning to release new database-specific extensions for DB2 and Cloudscape. They'll be added to the PHP Extension Community Library (PECL) and will give developers an API that can be used in both PHP 4, which still has a huge user base, and the newer PHP 5. While done as an adjunct to Zend Core, this helps ensure that DB2 apps written now will remain viable through PHP's continued evolution.

In Conclusion
Whether you're a DB2 or Cloudscape developer eyeing PHP, or a PHP coder pondering DB2 or Cloudscape, this is exciting news for everyone. IBM's involvement cements the wildly popular PHP's position in the pantheon of web platforms. Also, by putting the IBM name behind what some still see as a street-level language, the partnership mitigates a lot of the perceived risk of using PHP for enterprise-level, mission-critical applications.

Enterprise developers, welcome to the party.