I'll admit that when I read yesterday IBM is putting its corporate might behind PHP, creating a product that combines its Cloudscape database with Zend's PHP tools, my first thought was what's PHP?

(By the way, that PHP pinup girl comes from a Lithuanian PHP tool maker.)

Then I took a look at the recent output of this blog. All recent stories here carry the .php extension. They're no longer HTML. The output is still readable by any browser as an HTML file, they're just not written with a pure HTML tool.

The real news, however, is much bigger.

We're seeing nothing less than a mainframe revolution.

PHP is an open source scripting language that can do many things, including writing a graphic interface to a desktop application. Here at Corante, PHP outputs attractive pages that can handle many types of input. I suspect we're just scratching the surface of what PHP can do here at Mooreslore, but one of the things it's best at is handling a wide range of databases.

IBM wants its databases to be among them, so it has put out a technical roadmap that will lead to an open source Zend Core in the second half of the year.

And what is Zend Core, really?

Zend Core is based on Cloudscape. That's the name of the server IBM has created for its old DB2 database format. Thus, IBM's old mainframe tools are entering the computing mainstream through open source. With Linux IBM has one tool that will combine all its old mainframe, minicomputer, PC, client, and server stuff into one environment, so the wisdom of 50 years need not be lost.

That's not just big news. It's very good news.