WebSphere sMash and the PHP community.

The WebSphere sMash team are active members of the worldwide PHP community. Whilst we run PHP on our own virtual machine, we do use many of the PHP extensions developed at PHP.net. When we started development, we asked members of the PHP community how we could best contribute to PHP and what we heard overwhelmingly was by contributing tests. So as we develop WebSphere sMash, all the tests we create are contributed into Open Source at PHP.net to become part of the PHP test suite. So far we have contributed around 3000 of the 8000 tests that exist in the suite. We are also active members of the PHP QA team and have also contributed to the organization of PHP's Test Fest.

Many other language communities have found it to be helpful to have multiple implementations, because adding another perspective helps to drive out ambiguity and corner cases in the design of the language and its implementation. We have seen quite a lot of that and members of the sMash team have been active on the mailing lists and IRC helping to clarify the language design, proposing patches where we can. We have raised many bugs at PHP.net, a large percentage of which have been fixed by the core team. We have even fixed quite a few bugs there as well.

We also think that we contribute to the PHP community by taking PHP to new markets and environments. Given who we work for, we have many contacts into large enterprises. We have already taken PHP into places that previously could not consider using it such as within our Enterprise transaction processing product CICS and our messaging middleware Message Broker. We hope and believe that this creates opportunities for everyone in the PHP community.