Big Blue backs PHP

IBM's announcement that it is backing the PHP programming language is no surprise to those who closely follow trends on the web. The proliferation of PHP-driven websites is astonishing: by every measure, it is the single most popular web application serving technology on the Internet.

The partnership with PHP creator Zend Technologies is built around a new bundle called ZendCore. It consists of IBM's Cloudscape embedded database and Zend's PHP development tools.

The telling quote:

One industry executive who requested not to be named said that IBM's push into PHP and scripting reflects IBM's disillusionment with the Java standardization process and the industry's inability to make Java very easy to use.

Given that Gartner has reported that more than 70% of J2EE web applications are utter failures, this should come as no surprise.

...To date, around 70 percent of initial Java implementations have been unsuccessful, according to new research from Gartner Group. "An inordinately large number of large-scale Java projects have been failures," said Mark Driver, Gartner research director for Internet and ebusiness technologies.

News.com: Big Blue backs PHP for Web development