Zend Technologies took the wraps off a new cloud service for developing and deploying software developed in the PHP web server-side scripting language on Tuesday at the ZendCon conference in Santa Clara, CA. Called phpcloud.com, the service lets developers rapidly build applications based on a number of frameworks and then deploy them into production.

While languages like Ruby may have become the popular kid as of late, PHP is still the leading web technology in terms of the raw number of deployments, with over 20 million domains using the Apache PHP module alone. A number of PHP-based platform-as-a-service providers are already out there, including PHP Fog , Red Hat's OpenShift, and Orchestra (recently acquired by Ruby-on-Rails PaaS provider Engine Yard). But unlike some “platform-as-a-service” plays, Zend's allows developers to pick the infrastructure provider for deployment—a public or private cloud, or an in-house Zend Server system.

The core of phpcloud.com is the Zend Application Fabric. This is a set of resources based on Zend Server that automates many of the tasks associated with configuring and managing virtual server workloads in a cloud environment, including the auto-scaling of resources to handle surges in application usage. Server instances within the fabric are set up as PHP runtime “containers”.

The containers, which include the PHP framework and the databases used to support the application code, can be copied as snapshots, saved, and shared with other developers working on related projects.

Each application deployed in the Application Fabric environment also automatically gets configured for source code management. The applications can be accessed as a code tree using Git, allowing developers to work collaboratively on elements of the application in their development tools of choice, and commit them back to the project in the sandbox.

The runtime environment in the developer sandbox is heavily instrumented for debugging as well. PHP errors flash up when the app is run off the site, and a click takes developers straight to the offending line of code. There's also a server-side code trace that steps through code to help find bugs and discover issues in application performance.

Zend's executives announced support for the Zend Application Fabric at launch on Amazon Web Services, IBM SmartCloud, Rackspace, and Red Hat OpenShift. The platform can also be deployed as part of an organization's custom private cloud. And Zend is providing a free version of the service for developers as well, currently in limited preview. The phpcloud.com Zend Developer Cloud offers a way to quickly jump into application development projects and collaborate on them before moving them to a production environment. It then provides all the debugging features associated with the Application Fabric through a self-service web interface.

On the IDE side, Zend released the beta of its ZendStudio 9.0, which can also plug straight into the Zend Application Fabric environment in both the Developer Sandbox and deployment environments. The tool can be used as a bridge between the two as well, pulling from the sandbox environment through Git and pushing code up to the target cloud platfom (or to a local Zend Server) as an XML file package.

For Web shops that have invested in PHP development, Zend's combination of tools seems to offer a lot: high developer productivity, cheap and effective collaboration and debugging before committing to a full deployment, and the flexibility to move from one hosting or cloud environment to another without code changes. And given the level of lock-in that comes with many cloud platforms, that has to be a good thing, right?