A conference attendee lauded capabilities planned for version 6. Both internationalization and traits "will be really useful for us," said Pierrick Charron, of Nstein, which offers a PHP-based content management system. Internationalization currently presents difficulties in PHP, he explained

Gutmans also stressed PHP's strengths, calling it mainstream for the enterprise and beneficial for cloud computing. "PHP's thriving  and the recession has been a big accelerator behind the adoption of open source and PHP," he said.  "Companies have to increase productivity and lower costs and PHP's a way to do that."

He also questioned the relevance of enterprise Java, calling it too complicated and not really designed with the Web in mind. "The Java community today has already discovered that enterprise Java is not suitable for Web workloads so they're trying to reinvent themselves by creating lightweight Web frameworks for Java," such as the , Gutmans said.

"What we're seeing is a lot of enterprise Java developers are moving away from enterprise Java. Some of them are staying [in the] Java world and going to lightweight Web frameworks but a lot of them actually moving to dynamic languages including PHP," said Gutmans.

Zend this week also announced a beta version of Zend Studio 7.1, an upgrade to Zend's PHP IDE featuring  remote server support and integrated support for task -focused programming based on the Eclipse Mylyn project. Version 7.1 is due to ship by the end of 2009.