Important information: this article is the opinion of Björn Schotte in the role of the editor in chief of the PHP Magazin.

I was just reading the new Computerwoche (one of the most recognized weekly IT journals in Germany) and found an article called „PHP steht vor einem Generationenwechsel“. It’s quite interesting (irony!) and I wonder who gave the author of the article these information (please e-mail me, thanks). The article is available online, unfortunately only for Premium users

Just to cite a few things:

„Bisher besteht die Programmiersprache aus dem Zend-Core, der ausschliesslich von rund 20 Zend-Angestellten entwickelt wird.“ (Currently, the language [PHP] consists of Zend-Core which is developed exclusively by 20 Zend employees)

„Das Gesamtprodukt, PHP, verbreitet Zend in zwei Varianten, der Entwicklungsumgebung ‚Studio‘ und der Produktionsumgebung ‚Platform'“ (The full product, PHP, is distributed by Zend in two product lines, the development environment ‚Studio‘ and the productive environment ‚Platform‘)

„Nach zehnjähriger Erfolgsgeschichte ändert Zend die Architektur der Scriptsprache“ (After ten years of success, Zend changes the architecture of the scripting language) (followed by a diagramm only talking about Zend’s products which I mention later on)

The article also mentions the „Complete PHP Toolkit“ which will be available later this year (with another name) and contains the „Zend Core“ (which is a PHP distribution + fixes + support) plus the Zend Framework, a Eclipse IDE for PHP, the Apache web server, one integrated database (i.e. DB2, Oracle, MySQL or the like) und the „Zend Network“ – Computerworld drew a chart with the title „The future of PHP“ structured by the components „Zend Studio Pro“, „Zend Platform Pro“ and „Complete PHP Toolkit“ (they mentioned the creator/source of the chart – Zend).

While I admire that Zend created some valuable partnerships with big giants like IBM or Oracle and the hard work Zeev and Andi were putting into developing ZendEngine(2), I’m not sure if such misinformation is the right way to go. Furthermore I don’t know if it’s right to think that it’s important for the success of PHP even if it comes at the price that something gets misprinted.

Sorry guys, I really don’t want to piss you off (yes, we like Zend products, i.e. ZendStudio and purchased 30 licenses) but this is not the right way to foster the success of PHP together with the community that built PHP, even when looking at enterprise environments. I have been discussing this issue with you for years now and I’m wondering when this will all come to an end.

I’m open for comments and discussions here in the blog, personally at a meeting or in the magazine.