Recently the news broke that the programmers of PHP already had the possibility to create applications for android.  This was sold as a great novelty, however, using technologies that already existed to carry this out. The title of the news should be something like: Zend Studio will allow the deployment of cloud applications for mobile devices, because this is really what it means. I’ll see if I can explain to you, far above, how the applications in PHP for Android work.

So far, most applications for Android have been developing in Java, but many projects that try to change this. Two of them were Phone gap and Cordova, although we could speak of them as if it were one.

Cordova is an Apache Foundation project that offered an API to access the various devices of a mobile terminal such as the camera, the accelerometer, the GPS, and so on. Cordova ended up absorbing Phone gap, which offered services to create cross-platform mobile applications with HTML + CSS + JavaScript.

In an application we developed with Cordova we could already use a web service made in PHP, so what has changed? Nothing, or almost nothing, really. The news was that Zend created a way to deploy what they call “cloud applications for mobiles” through their Zend Studio.

The Zend Studio, which does if we want to use one of these applications as a new project, is to create two parallel projects: a project (Web service) in the cloud and another one for our device.

The cloud service can stay wherever we want or in a hosting that has dedicated Zend for this called Zend Cloud Solutions.

The part of the device will be stored in the device itself and Zend Studio will offer us a GUI (WYSIWYG style) to create the interface of our application.

With this, it will be possible to create applications that use Web services, will it be possible to create applications that can be used offline?, I suppose somehow, but this has not been very clear to me.

Anyway here is a small diagram taken from the official Zend documentation for the Cloud Connected Mobile:

Zend, PHP and Android, how does this work?

In short, the fact is that Zend has done a huge job in facilitating the deployment of applications in Cordova for Android, but what in a headline might seem like a novelty is something that, indeed, had been used for a long time. Some skeptics will say that this technology is not interesting or green for “serious” applications, but did you know that the Wikipedia application was already using it, how do you have the body?