In the recent ‘State of PHP and Zend Framework Development’ survey by Zend Technologies 85% of PHP developers surveyed named Linux as their primary operating system while 11% named Windows and 2% named Mac OS X. However when asked to name their primary operating system for development, 42% named Windows versus 38.5% who chose Linux and 19.1% who chose Mac OS X.

Google has released a new hosted software platform offering developers access to its application servers. Google App Engine service that includes a distributed Web server, database and storage, software development kit, which enable developers to write Web applications in Google’s SDK, and upload them to the company’s servers for hosting. The Google App Engine currently supports only Python, which will surely be a significant boost to interest in and usage of the Python language for web applications.

Froglogic GmbH today announced version 3.3 of the leading, cross-platform automated GUI testing tool Squish. Squish supports creating and running automated GUI tests of applications based on a variety of user interface technologies including Trolltech’s Qt toolkit, Java AWT/Swing/NetBeans, Java SWT/Eclipse RCP/JFaces, Web/HTML/AJAX and Mac OS X Carbon/Cocoa.

Squish is being successfully used in QA departments across the world in companies such as Reuters Financial Software, EADS, Siemens, Synopsys, Xilinx, Trolltech and France Telecom Group.

Wingware recently announced the first public beta release of Wing IDE 101, a free scaled back edition of Wing IDE that was designed for teaching introductory programming courses. It is released to the general public to help others teach with or learn Python.