UK.Builder.com has a new posting today about one of the heavywieghts in the industry putting their full force behind PHP - IBM throwing its weight behind PHP.

IBM is putting its corporate heft behind PHP, in a move meant to reach out to a broader set of developers. On Friday, the tech giant is expected to announce a partnership with Zend Technologies to create a bundle called ZendCore, which includes IBM's Cloudscape-embedded database and Zend's PHP development tools. Zend sells tools built on the open source edition of PHP and offers related services.

IBM also plans to establish an area dedicated to PHP on its developer Web site, which will include technical resources such as white papers.

IBM, in the past, has been very committed to Java and to keeping it alive. They state, though, that they are going to try to put just as much force behind this PHP endeavor as they did with Java. Will the result make as much of an impact on the community as their push for Java did? (Thankfully, they seem to understand that PHP and Java are really made for accomplishing different tasks, so there won't be an effort to do any kind of marger...).

Thanks to David for the link...