A big promise: Rapid Application Development for PHP

CodeGear, the company responsible for continuing Borland's developer tools made an interesting announcement this week: Delphi for PHP ("a component-based rapid application development (RAD) IDE, and VCL for PHP, an open source visual component library"). Although the final product it's not yet available the promise they made - to deliver RAD productivity to PHP developers - sounds very good if we look at the promoted features:

• VCL for PHP – Open source PHP 5 visual component library with more than 50 extendable and reusable components with seamless AJAX integration
• Out-of-the-box database integration with InterBase, MySQL, Oracle®, Microsoft SQL Server, and other popular databases
  Integrated PHP debugger
• Deployment of PHP applications on Windows, Linux, Solaris and other platforms
• Internationalization support for applications
• Drag and drop database application development using the Data Explorer for InterBase and MySQL
• Code editor with Code Insight, Code Explorer, and Code Templates, making it easier and faster to write PHP code

Delphi for PHP is scheduled to be available in March. The product will be available for an introductory price of $249. I truly hope that CodeGear will not disappoint us with this and they will bring Delphi back to life in one form or another.