At EclipseWorld this year I presented tools for developing Python and Perl applications within the Eclipse IDE. These were extensions built and released by enthusiastic programmers who needed the tools, developed them, and decided to let other interested people (like me) use them.

Now it seems Zend are going to be formally joining the Eclipse project, as detailed in this Computerworld piece.

This is great news. PHP is a wonderfully rich web development platform, and Eclipse could give us the ability to develop and deploy PHP apps in a straightforward and intelligent manner. We can already develop HTML in Eclipse, so the merging of the two makes sense.