By Nate D'Amico

For the Eclipse lovers out there, IBM has another free toy for you to experiment with. It's geared toward web application development, and is dubbed Project Zero. With Project Zero, IBM hopes to entice Java, PHP, and Groovy developers to use its platform for creating next generation web applications. Among the interesting aspects of Project Zero, developers are encouraged to compile PHP into Java classes to have it run in the same Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as the rest of Project Zero's Java code. The project leverages communities in ways that open sourcers will recognize.