Aldon has announced enhanced support for the open-source PHP language as part of its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) suite.

By using Aldon ALM to manage PHP, organizations gain processes, predictability, and visibility across Web-centric development projects, the company said. These all are key benefits rarely associated with that area of development. The enhanced PHP functionality found with Zend demonstrates Aldon's commitment in delivering the most complete ALM, crossing both traditional and Web-based development, the company said.

PHP is the powerful, open, and easy-to-use Web application language widely used for content management, customer relationship management, blogs, e-commerce, and many other Web-based applications. It is now the most widely used Web scripting language, surpassing ASP.

In the IBM i (System i, iSeries, AS/400) world, more and more companies are turning to PHP to modernize their applications and create Web-based interfaces to RPG programs and DB2 database files.

Zend (http://www.zend.com), has established itself as the de facto guardian of the PHP language with its Zend Solutions for IBM i. Aldon's compatibility with the Zend Studio for Eclipse development environment has now brought comprehensive ALM capabilities to the PHP community. It also opens the door for IBM i platform users looking to modernize applications faster with ALM.

Open-source PHP has given developers access to a rich and dynamic object-oriented language while the open-source Zend Framework promotes best practices and provides myriad building-block components to speed up time to production. However, managing these fast-moving projects is a big challenge. Strict management of the open-source code behind these applications is vital to maintain established Service Level Agreements and to comply with strict auditing regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley. Aldon's process-driven ALM is perfectly suited to address these issues. It provides the development flexibility, management, and control essential for successful business application development. It can also manage all aspects of PHP development, including testing, deployment, implementation, and reporting.

Jim Dillard, alliance manager for Zend Technologies, states, "Zend's goal is to set the standard for best practices in high-end PHP development across the entire application lifecycle and that can only get better with Aldon in the mix. With Aldon ALM, we anticipate new levels of operational efficiency where projects can be tracked, code easily found, and teams work together on an entirely new level."

Aldon's integrated inventory management is a key piece to delivering that efficiency, ensuring that all facets of an enterprise-crossing PHP application are fully tracked, the company said. This gives PHP adopters the following benefits:

• Automatically track historical data for audit compliance.
• Quickly locate the components necessary for the task at hand, regardless of language, location or platform.
• Easily re-use previously developed components to facilitate SOA.
• Determine the current status of every artifact at a glance.
• Know that you are always working on the correct version of the artifacts, and that it is secure.
• Easily gather all components changed by the originating task, regardless of location, for ease of management,      testing, promotion, and documentation.
• Automatically capture each milestone event in the lifecycle e.g. checkout, promotion, approvals.

For more information, visit http://www.aldon.com/.