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Zend and Adobe Partner on RIAs at PHP User Conference
9/18/2008
For the fourth year in a row, the once-obscure-now-ubiquitous dynamic scripting language, PHP, took center stage at the annual Zend/PHP conference in Santa Clara, CA. The big news at this year's show (also known as ZendCon) comes from Adobe Systems, which announced plans to collaborate with Zend Technologies, the show's sponsor and the creator and commercial maintainer of PHP.
The two companies said they will be working together to deliver technologies, content, and services aimed at making life easier for enterprise developers building rich Internet applications (RIAs). The collaboration involves Adobe's Flex technology on the client and PHP on the server.
Under this new partnership, San Jose, CA-based Adobe will become a contributor to the Zend Framework, which is Zend's open source, object-oriented Web-app framework. Specifically, Adobe will be providing support for its Action Message Format (AMF), a proprietary protocol originally created by Macromedia and acquired by Adobe when it bought that company. AMF is an open, binary, high-speed format that allows the Flash Player, Adobe's nearly universally implemented client runtime, and Flex-based client apps to exchange rich media and other data with servers.
According to Andi Gutmans, Zend's cofounder and co-CTO, this AMF support will optimize communication between server-side Zend Framework components and client-side Adobe Flex components. The idea, Gutmans explained, is to provide developers with a technology for fast transfer of data between the server and client tiers of their Web applications.
"Adobe is the leader when it comes to enterprise RIAs," Gutmans said. "We believe that it's extremely important for our customers for us to have this relationship."
Cupertino, CA-based Zend has been cultivating such technology partnerships over the past few years. In addition to Adobe, organizations collaborating with Zend include Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM, as well as the nonprofit Eclipse Foundation.
"We need these relationships to get the interoperability PHP developers need to be successful in an enterprise environment," Gutmans said.
Zend kicked off what Gutmans called a two-legged RIA strategy last year. The first element centers around AJAX, which led to a partnership with the Dojo Foundation, sponsor of the popular open DHTML toolkit written in JavaScript. Flex, Adobe's open source framework for building and deploying cross-platform RIAs based on Adobe Flash and AIR, represents the second element.
It's a good fit for Adobe, too, said David Wadhwani, general manager of Adobe's Platform Business Unit. The company has seen strong uptake of Flex among PHP developers since Adobe first brought it to market, Wadhwani said in a statement. The collaboration "furthers Adobe's commitment to open technology initiatives," he said, and will "enable developers using Flex and Zend Framework to rapidly deliver highly engaging applications to both the browser and the desktop."
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