On the RIA Zone (a part of the DZone network) there's a new tutorial from Ryan Stewart about combining PHP with the Flash Collaboration Services (real-time collaboration and social capabilities via the LCCS) in the second part of his series (part one).

Another great way to integrate LCCS and PHP is with the REST APIs and the library that ships with the LCCS SDK. With those APIs we can perform a number of management functions including creating and deleting rooms, managing roles, and creating templates. These APIs make it very easy to create a customized, dynamic collaboration experience with PHP. You can create rooms on the fly for your users and get information about what kind of content is in those rooms. In this example we're going to create a basic room manager with PHP that will let us create, delete, and view information about specific rooms.

Code is included to use the AFCS PHP library to connect to the Services API and pass in the username and password directly from the user. The request is made and a token is passed back to the calling script. The XML description of the full Flex application is included in the tutorial.

Noupe.com has posted a top ten list of what they consider some of the best PHP/Ajax-based webmail clients (as based on the user interface and ease of use).

Employees need to access their email from wherever they happen to be '" on the road, at customer sites, remote offices, and at home. [...] Today i wanted to share with you 10 AJAX-based webmail client that delivers the look and feel, usability and performance of a desktop application. Some of the webmail clients listed below are open source code that can be easily modified to better suit user's needs, while others are not. So You must check their license to know the rules.

Included in their list is software like:

• RoundCube
• Zimbra
• SquirrelMail
• Hastymail
• Claros inTouch

Some of these tools offer more than just email too - they can include things like collaboration tools and mobile versions right out of the box.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, Ute has posted about a developer blog that has been started up for PHProjekt:

Seven and half years and a lot of downloads later the development team decided that a complete makeover is necessary not only to include more Web 2.0 features but also to add new functions to one of the most popular Open Source Groupware based on PHP. [...] There are still some months left till PHProjekt 6 will be released but for the time being you can follow the progress in a developers' blog started recently.

The blog already has information on the upcoming version (PHProjekt 6) and a first part of a "what's new" series on additions to the project. PHProject is an open source groupware application providing tools like shared calendars, project management and file management.

Matthew Turland has posted some of his thoughts about a topic that's being tossed around in the programming world these days - that PHP is "on its way out".

I have to vehemently disagree with this, and not just because PHP is my language of preference.

He gives several reasons to back up the claim including the fact that large players use the language in high-profile sites as well as the recent upturn of popularity the language has seen (as people come back from the over-hyped other languages).

He mentions collaborations between PHP companies/divisions as well as components made to more efficiently run PHP applications on other web server types.

As mentioned in this post on the Zend Developer Zone, the Zend/IBM collaboration group have released a Web 2.0 Starter Toolkit:

It offers a great start to reducing the coding yet helps you produce cool applications using Ajax, ATOM feeds and REST Web Services. It is a great on-ramp to get you working with Zend Core and IBM DB2 Express-C and Rich Internet Applications (RIA). This toolkit will also work with Zend Core for IBM, check out the FAQ. This is an excellent use case for DB2 pureXML.

It makes things simple like making ATOM feeds from a data in a pureXML database, making web services as simple as a point and click operation and check out the usage of your database via an Ajaxed interface.

Check out the project's website for more information. Currently, the project requires Windows (either XP or Server 2003).

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a press review with some good news for PHP developers all over - Zend and Acutate are collaborating to provide reporting (BIRT) to PHP.

he collaboration between Zend and Actuate has resulted in new capabilities in the 3.0 version of the Zend Platform, which is available today for download as a pre-release version at www.zend.com. Zend Platform 3.0 allows PHP developers to quickly integrate reporting capabilities, including charting, to web applications by calling Actuate BIRT reports via the Zend Java Bridge.

New functionality included in this collaboration includes flexibility when generating the reports (output formats/export options), an easy-to-use visual environment, and an integrated charting system including various graphing formats (like pie, chart, area, scatter, and stock).

Check out the full press release for the full story on this collaboration.

On the ITBusinessEdge site, there's a quick column from Lora Bentley looking at things from the other side of the Zend/Microsoft story - Microsoft's.

She mentions the "about face" that Microsoft has seemingly made when it comes to Open Source projects, specifically the Zend deal:

As a DigitalJournal writer pointed out yesterday, the deal makes great business sense for Microsoft, given that PHP runs more than 2 million Web sites and the software company's servers and tools business contributed one-fourth of its total revenue in the latest quarter.

You can get complete information regarding the collaboration from the Zend website.

Andi Gutmans of Zend has posted a new item on his Blogspot blog today concerning one of the announcements that Zend made today in their keynote - the collaboration between Zend and Microsoft to get PHP working even better with Windows.

Today we announced a partnership with Microsoft. The goal of this technical collaboration is to make PHP on Windows a first class citizen. It has always been our goal to make PHP run well on any platform, and this initiative reinforces that. Both companies have also observed huge interest both from the community and our respective customers bases in good PHP support on Windows, and therefore, collaborating on making this happen is a no-brainer for both.

He mentions that it's not the first time that Zend and Microsoft have collaborated, but that this new effort will go far and above the previous effort. He goes on to talk about what the partnership means for both companies and the steps that are being made to get the functionality stable and out to the community.

Live from the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo 2006, there have been several announcements about collaborations and new releases that Zend is a part of, including work with Microsoft, MySQL, and IBM.

• A technical collaboration with Microsoft to enhance the experience of running the PHP scripting language on Windows Server 2003 and the next version of Windows Server, code-named "Longhorn." The cooperative effort aims to provide customers with richer functionality and better integration.
• Zend also announced an agreement with MySQL that will enable it to better integrate the open source database with Zend products, including the option of full integration.
• New milestone releases of Zend Framework and the PHP Eclipse project were announced, along with Zend Studio 5.5 and an update to Zend Core for IBM that makes it compatible with the latest version of DB2 and adds support for the Informix Dynamic Server (IDS). A new product called ZendBox[tm], a fully hosted and managed PHP 5 Technology stack was also announced.

Youo can get complete information on all of these new innovations from Zend on their press release page:

• Information on ZendBox
• Zend and Microsoft's collaboration
• the Zend Product Updates