The Eclipse Foundation on Tuesday released Eclipse PHP Development Tools 1.0, software that it hopes will open Eclipse up to the millions of PHP Web developers.
Eclipse has become a widely used integrated development environment for Java programmers. But scripting, or dynamic, languages like PHP have become increasingly popular, particularly for the front-end development. Now people trained in Eclipse can write PHP applications and get access to about 1,400 plug-ins.
But Zend has chosen to participate in the project and will build commercial tools on top of the Eclipse PHP Development Tools software. It plans to introduce the commercial tools in the first quarter of next year.
Why? It's better to disrupt your own business than have someone else do it to, he says. The tools project also makes PHP--already used by 4.5 million people--potentially more appealing to programmers looking for a better tool or already familiar with Eclipse. About 50 percent of PHP developers already use Java, he said.
The Eclipse tools, combined with the Zend Platform, which acts much like an application server, Zend and other vendors are making PHP more corporate-friendly, de Visser said.
"We look at (Microsoft's) .Net as a good example. We're very comfortable mimicking (that) and knowing that companies want an alternative because they don't want to buy the whole Microsoft stack."
Security researchers on Tuesday found PHP exploit code embedded in a GIF on a major image hosting site. The exploit code slipped through the proverbial gates with the aid of a legitimate image at the beginning of the file,
"It is a clever way to pass exploit code to others without it setting off alarms or attracting attention all while bypassing network security tools," the Sans security blog noted.
Malicious attackers planted PHP coded exploit script within an image file. PHP is often used as a programming language to create dynamic Web sites.
Once this type of malicious GIF is uploaded to a server, it can create havoc by remotely allowing more exploits to be deployed on the system, said Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer for the Sans Institute.
When users download the image to view it, the server parses the PHP code and the exploit is executed, as it serves the image to the user.
Over the past six months, this type of technique has been cropping up with greater frequency--from small family Web sites to, more recently, a major image hosting site, Ullrich said.
- prev
- 1
- next
