Photon is an open source PHP "micro framework" using Mongrel2 and ZeroMQ. It was created by Loïc d'Anterroches, who claims that Photon is three to 10 times faster than frameworks such as Zend. "Photon does not try to do everything, the core is small, easy to understand and without magic," d'Anterroches writes.

As an example, d'Anterroches posted the code for a real-time chat application built with Photon. "This is effectively the entire "server side views handling the jsSocket connection," he wrote on Hacker News. "The front end is a copy/paste of the chat available in the Mongrel2 examples."

Gearman is a tool for distributing processing jobs over one or more machines.

This article explains how to use Gearman in PHP applications to handle better the load of busy sites or applications that need to execute heavy jobs.

The enterprise developer community is dominated by Java and .NET developers. Java is a heavyweight technology. Historically, Microsoft has had a significant hold on the enterprise, primarily due to the hegemony of Microsoft Office, and the enterprise community has scoffed at PHP. Will they be more open to HipHop? We wonder if the term itself may be a cultural barrier for developers. We love the term and think it represents the youthful, modern transformation that is happening in the enterprise. Companies are moving to Web oriented architectures that embrace the open Web. APIs are becoming more important as companies see the importance of connecting with external applications.

Further, PHP is a language for developing Web applications. That seems like reason enough to adopt it. The enterprise is moving to the Web. They've been following what Facebook is doing. It makes sense the enterprise would also follow the lead Facebook is taking with HipHop.