Following up on some previous comments about Zend possibly lining itself up for a buyout, John Coggeshall has posted some of his thoughts on the matter being one of the ones that used to be "on the inside" of the company.

Zend has laid off approximately 25% of their R&D staff in at attempt to become cash-flow positive and potentially line themselves up for an acquisition. I don't have any hard figures as to what that means but I'd estimate that Zend's recovered somewhere between $6-8M in revenues [...] which is why Everyone I've spoken to who is familiar with the subject considers the lay-offs a positive thing.

He goes through the potential list of buyers that have been mentioned so far (Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo!, Facebook) and gives his "why" or "why not" reasons for the probability for each to make the purchase.

He also comments on the rumor of Andi and Zeev's recent trips up to Seattle...

According to some details over on TechCrunch there's a few rumors being started that Zend ("the PHP company") is looking to sell.

Israeli startup Zend Technologies has fired 25 percent of its R&D team (at least ten people), as well as others across the company, in an attempt to become cash flow positive, says a source close to the company.

The official Zend word is that yes, there have been layoffs but no, they cannot comment on the reasoning behind them. Several big names are being thrown around for possible buyers - Microsoft, IBM and Oracle - who have all shown interest in the past.

The IBM developerWorks website has a new tutorial posted showing how to create a web service with the combination of PHP and the Eclipse IDE.

Learn how to build Web services in PHP using the PHP Development Tools plug-in in Eclipse Europa. Become familiar with the PDT project, and learn how to create and deploy useful PHP projects, learn about the philosophy behind contract-first development, and understand the basic parts that make up a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file.

You'll have to register/sign in to get to it. They give an introduction to the PHP Development Tools for Eclipse, creating a WSDL file visually in the IDE and integrating it all to work with your Eclipse front-end.

The IBM developerWorks website has posted part one of a new series their doing introducing three of the most popular PHP frameworks - the Zend Framework, Symfony and CakePHP.

A few short years ago, one of the more common criticisms about PHP was that it did not support MVC-style architectures. Times change. And these days, there are a number of choices available in the world of PHP frameworks. This series takes a look at three widely used PHP frameworks - Zend, symfony, and CakePHP - examining their similarities and differences while building and extending a sample application in each of the three frameworks.

There'll be five parts to the series - this first one looking at the scope of the series and the getting the frameworks installed and the following parts on building the application (including Ajax functionality) and how to do something else, outside the framework.