Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen has joined Zend Technologies as a member of the firm’s board of directors.

Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape and the creator of the pioneering Mosiac browser, was a key player in the origins of Java, giving his support to the then-new programming language when it was launched by Sun Microsystems.

Also joining Zend’s board of directors on Thursday was Gaurav Dhillon, the founder and chief executive officer of jaman.com inc.

PHP, which originally meant Personal Home Page, then PHP Hypertext, is increasingly called just PHP and is used to create Web applications. Zend is a leading developer of PHP.