Red Hat, Zend Partner for PHP Developer PaaS on OpenShift

A new partnership between Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and Zend should give PHP developers more flexibility and ease of use when developing for the Red Hat OpenShift PaaS.

Zend, which specializes in PHP (it calls itself “the PHP company,” after all), has worked with Red Hat to launch a new server on OpenShift to provide developers with a professional-grade PHP development deployment and runtime environment where they can test out their applications for the cloud. To make application development as easy as possible, the companies have added built-in debugging, monitoring and application performance tuning capabilities to the new server.

Red Hat launched the OpenShift PaaS in May 2011 as a platform for developers to run and test cloud-based applications in their choice of programming language. Over the last year and a half, the company has expanded the capabilities of OpenShift, and this latest partnership with Zend now gives developers a focused PHP development server. Currently, the platform provides support for several different programming languages, including PHP, Node.js, Ruby, Python, Perl and Java. It also supports a variety of frameworks, including Zend, Java EE, Spring, Rails, Play and others.

As Ashesh Badani, general manager of the Red Hat Cloud Business Unit and OpenShift, noted in a prepared statement, the ecosystem for developers provided through the platform makes it simpler to deploy and manage applications written in a variety of languages.

“With millions of PHP developers in the world today, it is exciting to be able to collaborate on an offering that combines the power of Zend’s leading tools for PHP developers and our enterprise-grade application server with the flexibility and strong ecosystem of integrated partner solutions that Red Hat is building with the OpenShift platform,” said Andi Gutmans, Zend’s CEO, in a prepared statement.

The new server, available for free use to PHP developers, offers one-click deployment to OpenShift of a PHP runtime environment, a certified PHP stack, a job queue for improving application performance and reducing bottlenecks, and advance debugging in the cloud.