The PHP programming language has been much maligned in recent years, but it remains one of the most popular programming languages in the world. It serves as the foundation of web giants like Facebook and Wikipedia, as well as countless sites powered by open source platforms like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.
But Zend Technologies -- the company founded by PHP's adoptive parents, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski -- isn't resting on its laurels. Consumers are demanding mobile applications for accessing their favorite web applications, and Zend is responding to this shift with a new version of its Zend Studio product that will make it easier for PHP developers to turn PHP applications into cross-platform apps for Android, iOS, and other devices.
No, Zend isn't going to make PHP run on your phone. Instead the company is releasing a drag-and-drop interface for building graphical interfaces for mobile apps using elements from the popular JavaScript library jQuery. Once an application is ready, Zend Studio integrates with Adobe PhoneGap, a platform for turning HTML/JavaScript applications into apps that can run on all major smartphone operating systems and can be sold through the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, and other markets.
But those mobile apps will also need to talk to a server, so Zend Studio is also adding a new drag-and-drop tool for connecting mobile apps with web services using its existing Zend Server Gateway. An API (application programming interfaces) is a way for different pieces of software -- like a client and server -- to communicate. The most famous example is probably Twitter's public API, which enabled developers to build many new clients and applications (though Twitter is limiting access to it). But even a company building a small web application for internal use can take advantage of APIs to enable clients to connect to backend services. Zend is aiming to make it easy to set all of this up.
Although Gutmans says that companies should now be thinking "mobile first" by building in APIs from the ground up rather than bolting them on later, he says that the new version of Zend Studio can definitely be used to create mobile versions of existing applications.
Since mobile computing is also driving cloud computing, Zend is also betting on cloud environments. Zend Server continues to integrate with major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure. And last year, Zend launched its own PHP platform cloud called, appropriately enough, PHP Cloud.
