It always piques my interest when a company like IBM takes action in a PHP direction. Their incubator project ProjectZero is described as:

Project Zero introduces a simple environment for creating, assembling and executing applications based on popular Web technologies.

And, as one would expect, ProjectZero is primarily a Java stack of tools, including the use of Eclipse as a code editing environment. Within the stack, the primary scripting language is, unsurprisingly, Groovy. However, I *was* surprised that the 2nd (and only other) scripting language was PHP and not virtual PHP, but real PHP.

The toolkit looks like it’s got some really nice features, including the fact that it speaks REST natively. Might be worth setting it up and giving it a go.