Zend Technologies and IBM are expanding their partnership in the PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) application development space Wednesday, focusing on IBM's DB2 database. Featured in the arrangement are enhanced IBM DB2 Express-C capabilities in IBM Zend Core for IBM, which is Zend's PHP offering. DB2 Express-C is IBM's hybrid relational-XML data server for accessing enterprise capabilities such as data replication, Zend Technologies and IBM are expanding their partnership in the PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) application development space Wednesday, focusing on IBM’s DB2 database.Featured in the arrangement are enhanced IBM DB2 Express-C capabilities in IBM Zend Core for IBM, which is Zend’s PHP offering. DB2 Express-C is IBM’s hybrid relational-XML data server for accessing enterprise capabilities such as data replication, clustering and offsite disaster recovery. Also included is new support for DB2 Connect technology to access i5/PS and z/OS DB2 data servers. DB2 Connect technology makes it easy to build PHP applications that leverage DB2 hosted on IBM System z and System i servers. Additionally, users can leverage IBM System i Linux partitions and the System i attached BladeCenter and System x servers. Users also get a single source of support for the integrated PHP and DB2 stack. Zend will provide this support.Zend Core for IBM features a PHP-based application development and deployment stack that includes Apache, PHP, the Zend Framework and DB2 Express-C. Technology Industry