A new advancement for PHP is mentioned over on Linux Business Week today (as well as BusinessWire.com) about the use of Zend Studio 4 by Lockheed Martin in the development of the Online Project Information System (OPIS) project supporting astrobiologists at NASA. OPIS is a database which will be a sophisticated central repository of information for advanced life support systems developed for space travel.

According to these articles, there will be a presentation of this process at the upcoming MySQL User Conference (Apr. 18-21) in California. It sounds like it's just going to be a very flexible repository for the data that they're going to collect, allowing them to alter the structure dynamically to fit the data instead of the other way around. Of course, if it's built on PHP and MySQL, you know it will be fast and light...