Yesterday, in a keynote address at ZendCon, Andi Gutmans announced a partnership between Zend and Adobe. Zend also sent out a press release about it.

Together with Zeev Suraski, Andi founded Zend to promote the development of PHP. (Both of them helped me with Core PHP Programming and I used to write a column for Zend.com). Zend offers tools and support for PHP developers. Adobe makes many tools for designers, including Flash and Flex. Flash is an ubiquitous platform for games and videos hosted on Web sites. Flex is a programming language for building Flash applications that appeals to programmers more than the designer-oriented Flash studio.

Andi said the purpose of the partnership was to smooth out the experience of developing with PHP and Flex together. Specifically, the two companies plan to integrate support for Action Message Format (AMF) into Zend Framework (a library of PHP code developed by Zend). They also plan to get Zend's Eclipse-based PHP IDE working with Flex Builder.

I am looking at this in the context of Google's recent release of Chrome, a new browser that looks to compete with Firefox and MSIE. There are three significant platforms for rich internet applications: Flash, Silverlight and Ajax. Sponsors of those platforms, respectively, are Adobe, Microsoft and Google. Microsoft also supports Ajax but is doing what it can to squash Flash as it did Java. Mozilla is a strong supporter of Ajax, although we could argue that since most of their revenue comes from a deal with Google, it's passthrough support.

Flash and Silverlight can do one thing that Ajax can't, multimedia such as video. Otherwise, Ajax has a great advantage because it requires no plugin. Of course, Flash and Silverlight are easy to install, and Microsoft made a big push for installs by paying NBC to host a bunch of video for the olympics in Silverlight. Both Flash and Sliverlight still suffer from poor availabily, especially in lower end system. Sometimes an Ajax site might seem a little slow, but running a complex Flash app on a slow computer is painful and sometimes unendurable. I know this first hand from sitting with my kids trying to play Sesame Street games on an old Windows box.

I suspect this partnership between Adobe and Zend is a hedge on Zend's part. Zend also appears to be closer to Microsoft lately, and Microsoft certainly has been moving to support PHP. PHP's best strength has always been easy integration with everything and it hold helps to make it work well with Flex. Adobe on the other hand seems to be realizing that while their horse was out in front for a while, they are now falling behind. Ultimately, I see Ajax winning this race. For the next five years, Google will continue to have the midas touch and they have clearly chosen Ajax. PHP already has good support for building Ajax apps and this partnership will be a bonus.

Via a weekly email from Elance, I got a link to the following report: <http://www.elance.com/php/landing/main/ElanceSkillIndex.php>. (It pre-selected "Web & Programming" for me, but your mileage may vary.)

Elance is a marketplace for independent contractors and consulting agencies...not really like Clear Ink so much as the agencies down the line who will churn out production work. I find this data fascinating because it suggests how big the market is for a particular service and how many people there are serving it.  The numbers shown on this page are how many service providers there are. Clicking on the most of them will tell you how many open jobs there are. It looks like clicking on low demand skillsets return search results for providers.

For instance, for PHP I see 11,463 service providers and 1,906 open jobs. Logically, as a service provider, you'd want to be in an area with lots of open jobs and relatively low number of providers. As a buyer of services, you probably want to open jobs where there are the most number of service providers.

Of course there are complex issues to consider. Some of the technologies presented are subset of others. If you do ASP.NET, you probably also can do ASP. If you do Javascript, you certainly do DHTML and Ajax--even XHTML for that matter. Also, there is no distinction here between PHP 4 and PHP 5, but shops not experienced with PHP 5's object oriented features are probably comparable to shops who only do the old style of ASP. The most significant takeaway is that this report is not a recommendation to choose PHP because it's at the top of the list. Let's set aside the non-optimal breakout of the skills and look at the consumer to producer ratios.

I believe the numbers for Com are wrong. When I picked a developer on the list of "Com Experts", the skill wasn't listed. Since most of use have .com in our domains, I suspect Elance's search engine is making a mistake. Therefore, it looks like there's good opportunities for SEO, HTML, Flash, MySQL, Joomla and PHP. I'm somewhat surprised to see Joomla up there. My myopic view has been that Drupal is the darling of the CMS crowd.

If I put on my client hat, I might be encouraged to go with Drupal because there are 956 developers fighting over a measly 32 projects.

I also see that "Social Networking" is right in the middle of the list. That's great news for Clear Ink, or any agency looking to sell more of these types of leading edge services. As an agency aimed at leading clients with innovative techniques, you want to spend your time keeping yourselves at an expert level on the new trends and leave the commodity services (e.g. HTML) to partners.

We all know the common marketing technique of the branded, mostly worthless gifts we get from all sorts of vendors. Hey, look! Here's a coffee mug that costs ten cents to make, but this one has my logo on it! Do you love me yet? If I already love the brand, I'll probably like the tchotchke. For example, there's that awesome Linux Journal shirt I got at the 2004 Linux World featuring political choices of donkey, elephant and penquin. Come to think of that, I had to extend my subscription to get that shirt. Splunk's shirts are good too, and free (as in beer). Otherwise, we know this stuff is just junk. I like that old NaviSite notebook I got for listening to a sales pitch, and maybe it kept their brand in mind, but I didn't make the mistake of thinking of it as anything terribly valuable.

So, you might imagine what a turn-off it was to come across Open-source software: It's the free coffee cup of today over at CNET. Hey, SUN's a client of Clear Ink's. I have friends who work there. I think some of the stuff they are doing, such as Darkstar, is really great. And I really thought the MySQL acquisition was a great deal. But I cringed to read that CFO Mike Lehman compared MySQL to a free coffee mug. Yikes!

MySQL is a database I've lived with for about 11 years now. Along with PHP, it revolutionized programming for me. I wrote a book about it several years ago. I do not appreciate the notion that MySQL is just a cheap giveaway. The strategy to support open source software in order to sell hardware makes sense. Slipping up with a message like this does not demonstrate great marketing sense. I'm often told "you're not the target audience" when I express negative feelings about advertising, but in this case I a good representative of their demographic. Talking about a great product like MySQL in that way will not encourage IT managers to switch to MySQL.

Drupal 6.0 was released today. It has many new, appealing features. We use Drupal frequently for our own sites (such as Clear Night Sky itself) and work for our clients, such as Range Fuels. Obviously, many other big brands use Drupal, too.

This is one example of open source software firing on all cylinders. For certain uses, Drupal is the only serious choice.

I don't know if it's buzz around the SUN/MySQL deal, but I stumbled upon Ingres again recently. Computer Associates spun off the Ingres business a couple years ago with an investment from Garnett & Helfrich Capital. They did $50m in revenue last year. MySQL only did $20m, so it's worth keeping an eye on Ingres. Of course, MySQL has many more users, probably because MySQL is much easier to get on whatever platform you're on. I'd expect MySQL to be available any given Web host. I wouldn't be surprised to find PostgreSQL being offered, but I'd be puzzled to see Ingres offered. That is, until I read up on them recently.

Ingres has a familiar business model: give away the source code and charge for support. Of course, there's the "community" edition and the "Commercial" edition of the product. That's the same thing we see from Zimbra, SugarCRM and KnowledgeTree. Ultimately there's some sort of connector to Windows included in the commercial version, but that doesn't appear to be the case with Ingres. They call out on their datasheet that there's nothing different between the free version and the supported version. You just get support.

I appreciate that. It kind of bugs me to know there's some extra feature I might find useful if only I shelled out $5K. The Ingres folks seem to be oriented on open source first and secondly figuring out how to make the money work. And like I said, the money part is certainly working for them. They even plan to IPO later this year.

Ingres is using the tried-and-true marketing technique of coining a new term that really doesn't have much extra meaning, but it does help us all get the message across in the elevator. Their term is "Business Open Source". It's meant to be open source software that's compatible with enterprise business. They spell this out in a white paper called Ingres Business Open Source — Rising to the open source challenge. It starts from ground zero, which is good. Anyone who already knows what open source is, doesn't need to be convinced it's better than closed source software.

I like that they cover in two pages the biggest advantages of open source. These are terms that any IT manager can understand and they are free of the kind of posturing you might read on Slashdot. The theme here is that open source projects faced the dual challenges of not having a company standing behind them and they didn't have a long track record. It's a bit of hyperbole, and it's certainly not true that Ingres Corporation revolutionized anything by introducing the term Business Open Source. These guys spun off of CA in 2005.

This kind of bragging and fudging of the facts turns me off, but it can't trump the usefulness of the product. Form ought to function. I can't deny that this kind of text is the comfort an IT manager at a more conservative firm likes to have. The real appeal is the plain facts: lower cost of acquisition, transparency, shared risk, proven technology, available support and only the features you need.