Oracle To Release PHP Integration Tool

Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) announced it's working to allow developers to use the open source PHP scripting language to work with its 10g database.

The company and Zend, which was founded by the writers of PHP, will release Zend Core for Oracle some time in the third quarter. The scripting engine is designed to ease the development of PHP applications in Oracle.

Support from Other Places

"Oracle's support for Zend follows Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) Capital, a division of Intel, and SAP (NYSE: SAP) Ventures, a division of SAP AG, which have announced strategic investments in Zend," Stacey Quandt, senior business analyst, open source practice leader, Robert Francis Group, told TechNewsWorld.

"The venture capital funding of Zend as well as partnerships with industry vendors demonstrates the growing influence of PHP within enterprise IT environments," she said. "Users have an opportunity to consider Zend as an alternative to Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Active Server Pages and Macromedia's (Nasdaq: MACR) Cold Fusion."

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language that was designed for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. Oracle said it is still committed to Java, but that the two are very different. Java is a compiler language and is best for more heavy duty applications.

Win-Win

Quandt said Zend Core has advantages for both the open source community and Oracle. "The integration of Zend Core, a commercial version of PHP, with Oracle 10g benefits the open-source community because it will broaden the enterprise adoption of PHP," she said.

"The benefit to Oracle is that ZendCore ties the use of an open-source application integration infrastructure to Oracle 10g and will speed the development of Web applications. In essence this is a hybrid solution and with more features than IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Cloudscape database which also integrates Zend."

The initial release of Zend Core will be compatible with Novell SuSE and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) Linux, 64-bit IBM AIX and Sun Solaris. Later versions, due out in 2006, will add compatibility for Windows XP and Windows 2003.

IBM announced integration between Cloudscape and DB2 Universal Database with Zend in February.