Microsoft Partners With Zend
jesse.castro writes to point out news of Microsoft striking a multi-year partnership with PHP provider Zend to improve PHP's performance on Windows-based Web servers. From the article: "Rather than marking a sudden change of course, Microsoft is openly engaging in a dialogue with Zend, a key open source promoter, and millions of PHP developers, analysts said."
Um... no. Oracle bought InnoDB and BDB (both separate projects from MySQL), two of the many backend formats that MySQL can use. It still has MyISAM and a few others, not to mention that Oracle hasn't bought MySQL itself or anything it owns.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
You mean like Zend studio?
There is an excellent IDE for PHP. It's called PHP Eclipse, which is a plug in for Eclipse.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
A few people have mentioned Zend Studio, but I find it sluggish. My vote goes to ActiveState's Komodo.
I remember reading some interviews with companies whose technology had been "innovated" by Microsoft. One guy said (paraphrased), "It's a catch-22. If you partner with them, they get cheap access to your technology and take it from you. If you don't partner with them, they'll go to your competition and that might be the one time that the partnership works for the competition."
PHP is licensed under the GPL, so we don't need to worry about an MS-proprietary version of it. They'd have to reimplement the system from scratch, and who would bother to do that when they have ASP.NET?
.NET support for PHP so I could use it to write native Windows GUI programs, access ODBC in a more robust fashion, and get more access to Windows-internal stuff that is so easy to do on Unix but so hard to do on Windows.
I for one would love to see
A bit of performance would be nice, but chances are I will keep running my servers on Debian simply because that's all they are: brainless webservers with muscle and nothing holding them back.
I vaguely remember PHP not being GPLed the reason that MySQL made an exception in their licensing of the database to allow PHP to work and talk with it (MySQL consider communication over TCP/IP as derivative work, IIRC).