Oracle, Zend deliver beta of scripting tool

Oracle and Zend Technologies have released a beta version of Zend Core for Oracle, a tool designed to make it easier to write database applications with the PHP scripting language. The final product will be ready later this year. The beta was released Monday.

Zend Core for Oracle provides a driver and installation software designed to make it quicker to write Web applications with PHP. IBM has a similar product called Zend Core for IBM, which is designed to speed up the process of building Web applications that get information from IBM's Cloudscape and DB2 databases. Historically, Oracle and IBM have addressed programmers that work with Java, C, COBOL and other languages. However, both companies are looking to reach out to developers that use PHP and other scripting languages, which are increasingly being used to write business applications. Scripting languages are considered to be easier to learn than Java or C.