According to Netcraft, 40% of all web applications already run PHP, but IBM and Zend have decided that PHP needs to be fattened up to take on .NET.

So in the next few days Zend is going to join the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer and kick off an overarching open source initiative that it calls the PHP Collaboration Project, to create an industrial-grade PHP web application development and deployment environment.

Among other things, Zend want a PHP Framework developed to standardize the way PHP applications are built and create a uniform code base for next-generation web applications. Eclipse will be the IDE.

The Framework is supposed to accelerate the deployment of mission-critical PHP web apps by bringing simplicity, open standards, a "friendly" license and a structured development process to the party.

Besides IBM, which is lending manpower to the cause, Zend has collected a bunch of companies to help with the Collaboration Project including Oracle, MySQL, Intel, Actuate,  Ning, and ADP.

(This is a significantly abridged version of a story that appeared originally at www.clientservernews.com.)