Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Zend, Eclipse and DLTK

Why abandon PHP cause? I am a little bit concerned about Zend future and direction PHP takes from. I would like to see development of PHP itself more vibrant in terms of community support. Quality assurance technologies, new development instrumentation to overcome political PHP problems when new released versions are not compatible with the old ones - when API and quirks notices are growing bigger and bigger without any hope of refactoring. Majority of the tools available from PHP.NET site are outdated and even if considered minimally useful they definitely could be better. If only Zend could support full-time developers to support PHP.NET and community services like IBM does for Eclipse.

Zend is missing opportunities drowned in self-promotions in enterprise market. Should be good for them, but it needs to pay more attention to developers and PHP community. Zend seems to be a bunch of good folks, but also the ones who either very cautious, or do not have trust or resources to invest in communiy projects, or lack some essential management, market analysis skills used to keep in touch with the rest of the world to forecast and interpret the vision of PHP from outside.

Take a look at this initiatives that are quite dead and seem to be promoted only as a plug for community demands.

https://www.zend.com/php-collaboration/
http://www.zend.com/phpide/

I could only hope that Zend could crawl out from this crisis and receive good support from developers and financial companies to promote and bring joy of easy and fast application development to many of us. It is hard for a company who survives by selling products which ease the development, but another models of evolution are still possible.

I hope that the example of Eclipse success will make Zend think about elaboration on a global scale to reach common goals. Like support in the following project.
http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/dltk/

As for PHP freelancer and enthusiast if I'd be asked "Who is Zend?" I would tell "Zend's dead, baby. Zend's dead."

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