Zend has stepped PHP up to the plate lately. At their conference they just announced the Zend PHP Collaboration Project:
The Zend PHP Collaboration Project is an open source initiative through which the PHP community and Zend’s corporate partners will create an industrial-grade, de facto standard PHP Web application development and deployment environment, said company co-founder and CEO Doron Gerstel.
To begin with they have a web based framework, and then they have tools on top of this, created in the Eclipse foundation.
The heavy hitters at the conference were Marc Andreessen and Rod Smith (of IBM)
He also said:
“My new company is running a combination of Java and PHP. This is something I get no end of crap about”
The hardest problem for PHP to get over is the stigma.
I hope Zend takes PHP to the next level, gets it into the enterprise, and we see more competition :)