There are times when you go to conferences, and you have a great time. Then there are those other times when you decide “Hmmm…maybe next year” then kick your self when something really big is announced.

While I was lucky enough to see the announcement of OpenOffice at OSCON a few years back, this week I missed what may one day become the NextBigThing for the PHP Community from Zend.

If you haven’t yet heard of the [url=http://www.zend.com/collaboration/]PHP Collaboration Project[/url], you may want to go check out Zend’s website for it. From their FAQ:
[quote]The PHP Collaboration Project is an open source initiative through which the PHP community and partners will create an industrial-grade PHP Web application development and deployment environment.[/quote]

Sure, at the moment it is just an announcement. However, if anyone is going to be able to muster the open source [i]and[/i] big-business backing to actually pull off a decent/universal programming platform for PHP it would be Zend.

Good luck guys!