Zend adds Flex to PHP for developing rich Web apps Adobe partnership follows recent move in which similar accommodations were made for AJAX By Paul Kr

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) will be linked with Flex development for rich Web applications under an arrangement being announced Tuesday by Zend Technologies.

The announcement, which pairs PHP on servers to Adobe's Flex technology on clients, is one of several being made at the ZendCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif. The partnership comes just two weeks after Zend made accommodations for another client-side rich Internet development technology -- AJAX -- via an upgrade to the Zend Framework for PHP.

Tuesday's collaboration brings PHP and Flex communities together via the Adobe Flex Builder tool and the Zend Studio platform, said Andi Gutmans, CTO at Zend. Specifically, users will be offered instructions on quickly plugging Flex Builder into Zend Studio to provide a unified experience for building modern Web applications, he said.

"We're going to make sure Flex Builder and Zend Studio can work as one," with developers able to use PHP on the back end and Flex on the front end within the same development tool, Gutmans said. Both Flex Builder and Zend Studio are based on Eclipse technology, he said.

Adobe, Gutmans said, recognizes "the size and importance of the PHP community." Adobe had been geared toward Java and ColdFusion development communities, he said.

Adobe will contribute AMF (Action Message Format) protocol support to Zend Framework, which is an open source framework for PHP development. AMF is the protocol used by Flex to talk to back-end systems; it will be featured as an officially supported offering in Zend Framework 1.7 later this year. Users previously have had access to this code in the Zend Framework public project repository, but the official support is new, Gutmans said.

An Adobe representative stressed the synergies of Flex and PHP.

"Flex and PHP together make a lot of sense because Flex is just a UI technology," said Mike Potter, Adobe senior product marketing manager. Flex applications run inside the Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR.