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.

Daniel Crook points out the next meeting of the New York PHP Group where Dan Gisolfi will be talking about some of the latest things that IBM has been up to in the mashup arena.

Centered around the concept of "situational applications," IBM's work with mashups targets a growing trend in Web site development. [...] IT specialists should embrace the model as a foothold for PHP in the enterprise.

Some of Dan's presentation is outlined as well - a demo of IBM's Mashup Starter Kit, a look at best practices, and talk on the collaboration of IBM with Zend and ProgrammableWeb. If you're wanting to attend, be sure you RSVP as soon as possible (before the 21st @ 3pm) to reserve your spot.

Cal has posted the latest episode of the ZendCon Sessions podcast series today - episode four of Thornsten Rinne's "IBM DB2 with PHP 5.2 and AJAX" talk given at this past year's ZendCon.

Welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. We hope you enjoy today's session as we listen to Thornsten Rinne present "IBM DB2 with PHP 5.2 and AJAX".

You know the drill - you can get it one of three ways: grab the mp3, listen on the page or the easiest option - subscribe to the feed and get each new episode delivered right to you.

ITJungle.com has posted another article in their series looking at PHP on IBM's i5/OS platform that's already included an overview of System i and a very basic look at PHP's structure.

This article provides an overview of the API toolkit, and a collection of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that facilitate PHP programs accessing and working with i5/OS objects.

The article comes complete with diagrams of the stacks for both LAMP and iADP as well as an overview of the Zend Core API and a code example of how to make a connection to the backend and send off a message (SNDMSG) to the local system.

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.

Zend made some major anouncements at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo today involving Eclipse, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Zend Core:

Announcements included:

• Zend Studio for Eclipse - The all-new commercial PHP IDE for Eclipse with immediate availability of a downloadable beta version
• IBM releases the IBM Mashup Starter Kit, based on Zend Core, Zend Framework and DB2
• Delivery by Microsoft of a new FastCGI module to improve PHP performance on Windows
• Zend announces support for the Server Core option in Microsoft Windows Server 2008Oracle Announces PHP support for Connection Pooling in Oracle Database 11g

Check out Zend's press releases page for complete information on the announcements.

The Zend Developer Zone has an announcement about an upcoming PHP user group meeting happening in Boston:

What is less known is that PHP is also making significant inroads in the enterprise. Join BostonPHP, IBM and Zend as we discuss where Enterprise PHP (and OSS) is going and how it's going to get there. This promises to be a great evening with plenty of "horsepower" to answer your questions.

Speakers for the evening will be Mark de Visser, Zend's CMO and David Boloker, IBM's CTO of Emerging Internet Technologies. The meeting will be happening on Tuesday, September 11th starting at around 6:30pm. The meeting will be held in Cambridge at 1 Rodger's Street. Check out the official announcement of the meeting for full details.

A new article on the ITJungle.com website asks if Zend's support of PHP on IBM's System i machines could be the "next RPG", replacing the current language as the language of choice.

For years, the System i platform and its followers have marched through the wilderness of development languages, seeking a suitable replacement for the aging RPG, whose benefits aren't a good fit for a Web world. Now, some platform advocates see the server-side scripting language PHP stepping into that role.

The bulk of the article is an interview between Alex Woodie (of ITJungle.com) and Duncan Kenzie, president of Excel Systems. They cover topics like:

• Duncan's first perceptions of PHP
• why he decided it would be a good language to go with
• how it works in their WebSmart software
• differences between Java and PHP impacts
• the ease of the shift for RPG programmers to PHP