Zend Technologies today is set to announce a series of alliances intended to allow its PHP framework and development environment to work with other widely deployed RIA technologies from Adobe, Dojo and IBM. In a keynote speech at ZendCon, the company's annual PHP developer conference in Cupertino, Calif., Zend CEO Harold Goldberg reportedly was to deliver the news.

The most far-reaching collaboration will be with Adobe, and is aimed at simplifying development of PHP application that combine PHP with Flex, the company's popular framework for developing rich Internet applications. I received advance copy of an embargoed document, in which it was revealed that Adobe will help Zend integrate its Zend Framework with Action Message Format (AMF), Adobe's typed language for exchanging data between a Flash application and a database. The idea will be to enable "data integration between server-side PHP and client-side Flex data and logic components," according to the document. The alliance also is intended to simplify the use of PHP with Ajax and the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), Adobe's cross-platform environment for developing browserless desktop applications using Flash, Flex, HTML or Ajax techniques.

Zend also announced ties with The Dojo Foundation aimed at delivering a boxed solution for building Ajax-based Web apps using the Zend Framework and Dojo Toolkit for JavaScript. Zend Framework 1.6, released earlier this month, includes integration with the toolkit.

The company also updated Zend Core i5/OS 2.6, its certified PHP stack for IBM's i5/OS for IBM's iSeries systems with improved security, simplifies access to native i5 resources and includes Zend Framework 1.6, the company said. Also available now is Zend Studio 6.1, the latest version of Zend's Eclipse-based integrated development environment for PHP, adding the new framework and Dojo support.