NORFOLK, VA, March 27, 2001 - Three members of the PHP development project's core steering group have joined the elite Great Bridge advisory committee, Great Bridge announced today. Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of the PHP server-side scripting language; Thies Arntzen, an expert in PHP-database connectivity; and Sascha Schumann, co-author of a leading PHP book, Professional PHP Programming, will join the group of developers advising the company best known for its support of the PostgreSQL database. The move demonstrates Great Bridge's commitment to full integration of open source PHP and PostgreSQL to create powerful building blocks for dynamic, database-driven Web sites.

Great Bridge provides expert-level professional services and technical support for PostgreSQL, the world's most advanced open-source database. Yesterday, the company announced a wide-ranging partnership with Zend Technologies, the leading commercial provider of value-added PHP products and services. Zend co-founders Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans are also members of the PHP core development group.

PHP, created by Lerdorf in 1995 as a personal project to connect simple Web pages and databases, provides an open source alternative to proprietary offerings such as Microsoft's Active Server Pages and Allaire Corporation's Cold Fusion. PHP is one of the most successful and widely used open source technologies on the Internet; more than 2.5 million Web sites actively support the language, according to a monthly survey by Internet research firm Netcraft (www.netcraft.com).

Lerdorf, Arntzen and Schumann join a group of distinguished open source developers on the Great Bridge advisory committee, including 13 experts in various aspects of the PostgreSQL database.

"We believe the leaders of the hacker community can help us make better decisions as we help grow the open source user base into the mainstream corporate world," said Great Bridge President of Hacker Relations Ned Lilly. "Equally important, we want the people who contributed to the development of technologies such as PostgreSQL and PHP to share in our success as a company."

Lerdorf, a well known open source advocate, believes the PostgreSQL-PHP integration will strengthen both applications.

"Great Bridge is building an exciting company around the promotion and support of open source technologies," said Lerdorf. "I'm happy to be working with them to leverage their core competency in PostgreSQL into other widely used technologies. This will only make PHP and PostgreSQL better."

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