Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 12:50:44 -0700
From: Sara Killingsworth <saralk@home.com>
To: saralk@home.com
Subject: Zend Technologies News

Press Contact:	        Sara Killingsworth
			Media Relations Counsel
			Zend Technologies, Ltd.
			Phone: 480-961-1515
			Fax:   480-961-2126
			SaraLK@Home.Com

                            PHP
  First International Conference of PHP Group Agrees on Code 				
Improvements
		Will Formalize PHP Organization

Tel Aviv, Israel, January 25, 2000 - At the PHP Developers'Conference
last week, the PHP Group made a number of decisions and established
working guidelines for the continuation of code development for PHP.The
four-day meeting was attended by the group members as well as the
developers of MySQL, the most popular database used with PHP. As the
first face-to-face meeting of the PHP core developers, this conference
established a firm synergy and congenial relationship among the
developers, who have been working together on the code since 1996.

	The core developers established milestones for the release of PHP 4.0
Beta 4, scheduled to be the final beta prior to Release Candidate 1. The
attendees also decided that PHP 4.0 will bundle the MySQL client library
in the standard distribution, significantly reducing the complexity of
setting up an environment for developing database-driven dynamic web
pages.

	Major features for future PHP versions were planned. Already under
development is the PHP Foundation Classes library (internally called
PFC), designed to allow for the sharing of code developments and add-on
modules among developers worldwide. PFC will provide Web developers a
wider range of commonly-needed functionality for developing Web sites. A
committee formed at the conference will develop a framework for the
submission and editing process and create the infrastructure of the PFC.
	The core developers also expressed their intention to structure the PHP
group activities, thus forming a committee to make a proposal for
beginning the process of formal organization. In addition, the group
decided on enhancements to the PHP Web site. The four-day conference was
hosted by Zend Technologies and was sponsored by several
open-source-friendly companies.
	PHP is a freeware, open-source scripting language used for developing
dynamic Web pages for e-commerce and other dynamic Web applications.
Unlike other scripting languages for Web page development, PHP offers
excellent connectivity to most of the common database interfaces
(including Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, ODBC and many others). PHP also offers
integration with various external libraries which allow the developer to
do everything from generating PDF documents to parsing XML. Perhaps the
greatest advantage of PHP, when compared to other scripting languages
such as ASP or ColdFusion, is that it is open source and cross-platform
to adapt to today's heterogeneous network environments.
	PHP is the natural choice for developers on Linux machines running
Apache server software, but runs equally well on any other UNIX or
Windows platform, with Netscape or Microsoft Web server software. PHP
supports OpenLink, Win32 COM, Hyperwave, Empress, GNU recode, and PNG
file formats. It also supports the WDDX complex data exchange between
virtually all Web programming languages.
	
Attending the conference were:
Thies Arntzen, CTO of Digital Collections in Hamburg Germany
David Axmark, CEO of MySQL in Uppsala Sweden
Stig Bakken, Systems Engineer for FAST Search and Transfer ASA of  
Trondheim Norway
Andi Gutmans CTO of Zend Technologies, Ltd. in Ramat Gan Israel
David Hahn, CEO of ISPI of Lincoln, Nebraska, USA
Frank Kromann, VP Development of Swwwing A/S in Hellerup Denmark 
Rasmus Lerdorf, Senior Open-Source Researcher of Linuxcare Inc. in San 
Francisco, California, USA
Sascha Schumann, Independent Programmer in Germany
Zeev Suraski, CTO of Zend Technologies, Ltd. in Ramat Gan Israel
Colin Viebrock, Senior Developer of easyDNS of Toronto, Ontario Canada
Michael Widenius, CTO of MySQL in Uppsala Sweden
Andrei Zmievski, Sr.Internet Developer of ISPI of Lincoln Nebraska, USA
	For general information on PHP, visit http://www.php.net For an
introductory tutorial on PHP, see http://www.php.net/tut.php
				--End--