PHP in 2006

I have been thinking about blogging for long time, but didn't get enough motivation until, I received the recent copy of US News & World Report early this week. 50 ways to improve your life in 2007 - Start your own blog is one of them.
I will see, how it improves my life - but I am determined now. I am a technology professional, so my blogs are going to be about using technologies and it's impact on our lives and businesses. I am a software developer, so I can't seem to ignore the Web2.0 and it's impact on the way, we develop web based software today.
The PHP gained a new height in year 2006 and it was visible in the latest Zend Conference in Silicon Valley in early november. There were some very significant announcement made by zend folks and other giant partners like IBM, Microsoft and others.
Perhaps PHP on i5/OS was the biggest announcement of this year for many good reasons.
i5 systems have been darling of the midrange systems user community and opening it up for the easy web based data driven application is very good news for thousands of it's loyal user base.
Its no surprise that many websites were quickly setup to support this technology like this one and Zend has its official i5/OS website , where you can download and try the Zend i5/OS platform products.
The another big announcement in my opinion was the creation of Zend Framework. It's too early to say, if the framework will take PHP to enterprise quickly and smoothly, but since I have used it, I can atleast say that the framework is going to make developers life easy.
Since the framework is still in beta, it is undergoing changes in every beta release update, but you should give it a try, if you like to develop code in MVC architecture and use PHP in modular fashion.
I would specially like to point folks to the incubator project of Zend Framework called XCS (XML Content Store). This is a nice abstraction layer created in PHP for storing and managing XML data in DB2 using its latest pureXML technology. This article gives you quickstart on using the XCS and developing an enterprise ready application.
You may also want to take a look at the IBM redbook published recently. This redbook covers wide aspect of application development interfaces available with freely available version of DB2 Express database.

I will blog more on data for web2.0 in my next post. Until then, Thanks for reading this and Happy Holidays !!