ZendCon, the annual trade show for Zend, the PHP company, announced that Zend Studio 10 (Zend's IDE) will include functionalities that will let PHP developers prototype and build native mobile apps using PHP. The new capability includes a drag-and-drop mobile interface builder, integration with the Apache project's Cordova to access native mobile APIs such as those for cameras and accelerometers, and built-in PhoneGap integration for developers to publish native app packages to the various app stores.

You can see an example of the software in action here (video) and get a bit more information about the offering from this article from VentureBeat.

I do like working with client/server-like architectures and so I intend to be building apps that have a fair amount of server-side processing to back it up. More details on that to come in the next few months. [...] I have decided that, for the time being, to use PhoneGap for my frontend development. [...] So the question was what to use for the backend development and, to nobody's surprise I presume, PHP is my chosen way to go.

Some of his reasons for the choice include:

• PHP is stupid easy to scale
• It is tied to the web
• (Available) Frameworks
• Tons of blogs
• It integrates with everything

Check out the post for more of his reasons.