In a new press release (as posted on the ITJungle.com website), Zend has announced a collaboration between it and the COMMON Group to create a PHP advisory group:

Just before the July 4th holiday, Jim Dillard, the IBM alliance manager at Zend, and Ron Newman, who is chairman of COMMON's Advocacy Team and president of technology consulting firm Newmark Technologies, sent out a joint appeal via email for people to join the Zend Advisory Group.

The idea behind the group is to get together a bunch of COMMON members and have them provide direct input to Zend so the unique capabilities of the System i platform can be addressed more fully by Zend's products and to help Zend better understand how to interface with and deliver products to midrange customers.

Wondering if you (or your company) are in the group they're looking for? Here's some of the requirements:

• Are you currently a programmer using the System i?
• Have you installed Zend Core for i5/OS?
• Do you have a PHP application running now?
• Do understand the process of creating a call to the DB2 database?
• Can you invoke RPG commands via the PHP toolkit?

If this is you and you'd like ot get in on the group, send an email along to Ron Newman for more information.