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.