Big News From ZendCon: Zend and Microsoft Announce Their Partnership

Cal Evans (Editor-in-Chief) | 1 comment | October 31st, 2006

p. Yes, it’s true, Andi Gutmans announced today that Zend and Microsoft are teaming up to make PHP run better, faster and more stable on Microsoft Windows. The official Zend Press release “blog”:http://www.zend.com/company/zend_news/announcements/2006/10/microsoft_and_zend_technologies_announce_technical_collaboration_to_improve_interoperability_of_php_on_the_windows_server_platform lists several bullet points showing what the partnership is trying to achieve. Let’s rip one off to give you a little taste.

bq. Technical improvements for PHP deploying on the Windows Server platform will be submitted under the PHP license to the PHP community for feedback and contribution.

p. It also also quotes Bill Hilf, general manager of Technical Platform Strategy at Microsoft.

bq. “Zend is a clear leader in the PHP community, and we are excited to be working with it on this joint collaboration effort designed to provide developers using PHP with the best possible experience within a Microsoft environment.”

p. Andi Gutmans discussed this new move on his “blog”:http://andigutmans.blogspot.com/2006/10/making-php-on-windows-work.html. In it he gives a very interesting quote:

bq. There are now people at Redmond who understand that supporting interoperability between open-source software and the Windows platform will have benefits to their customer base. 4.5M PHP developers are hard to ignore, especially when so many PHP developers actually do their development on Windows.

p. Andi is not the only one talking about the partnership, Eric Auchard over at “Yahoo has a post about it”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061031/tc_nm/microsoft_zend_dc.

bq. “PHP has always worked on Windows. The problem is that it never performed very well,” Andi Gutmans, Zend’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said in an interview.

p. Finally “phpdeveloper.org”:http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/6614 weights in on this topic with a writeup on it as well.

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