LinuxWorld.com.au has a new article posted today detailing a new partnership between Oracle and Zend to enhance open source PHP development on Oracle databases via a free package called Zend Core for Oracle.

Due in the third quarter, the product will provide integration between the Oracle database and Zend's PHP environment. The offering will be available from the Oracle Technology Network, but Zend will sell related support services.

Zend Core is intended to streamline PHP development on Oracle's database, which otherwise can be complicated, according to Zend Vice President Pamela Roussos. "It can be a very time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone process. What we're doing is we're doing all the work," Roussos said. The Zend Core package enables PHP applications to be up and running with an Oracle database within minutes, she said.

For those of us out here that use Oracle for just about all of our (corporate) database needs, this sort of thing could really make a difference. It makes me wonder, though, if it's just going to be Zend-flavored wrapper around the current Oracle functionality or not. Granted, it's not all that hard to get the Oracle functions working in PHP - the difficulity usually comes in getting the libraries from somewhere so that you can do the compile...