Zend Delivers New PHP Tools

Zend Technologies, also known as the PHP company, has announced a new version of its open-source Zend Framework, a platform for building PHP applications.

"The new version, Zend Framework 1.9, features PHP 5.3 support, plus new and enhanced community-built, professional-level features for Web application development," the company said in a statement July 29. Zend also announced a new version of its IDE (integrated development environment) for PHP, Zend Studio 7.0.

"Zend Framework continues to broaden its appeal for professional PHP developers who want to benefit from a cohesive set of best practices, design patterns and a community-driven project," Zeev Suraski, CTO and co-founder of Zend, said in a statement. "With Zend Framework, worldwide talent and solutions are available for any business problem at hand, already solved and precrafted by someone in the massive Zend Framework open-source community."

New features in Zend Framework 1.9 include support for the newer PHP 5.3 as well as PHP 5.2. The new version of the framework also supports REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services, message queues, LDAP, RSS, Atom and DBUnit.

Click here to read about Zend's deal with IBM to bundle Zend's PHP-based Web stack with IBM system i software.

"In addition to building the new Shape.com site using Zend Framework, SonomaCreative is building all new Websites we design on a combination of the rock-solid Zend Framework components ... [and] our own custom in-house components," Mark Gordon, CEO of SonomaCreative, said in a statement.

"We have also found that the new Zend Studio 7, with support for creating and generating Zend Framework code, makes our job building Web applications for our clients much faster and easier," Gordon said. "The combination of Zend Framework and Zend Studio means we are more productive because we spend more of our time actually customizing applications for our clients and less time building the plumbing and standard components that every application needs."

Meanwhile, Zend Studio 7.0, which the company released as a beta in June, features support for the newly released PHP 5.3 as well as tight integration with Zend Server and Zend Framework.

"PHP is rapidly becoming a mainstay in the enterprise, and Zend Studio 7.0 provides everything a developer needs to quickly build dynamic, professional-grade PHP applications with high performance, security and reliability," Andi Gutmans, CEO and co-founder of Zend Technologies, said in a statement. "Zend Studio, together with Zend Framework and Zend Server, provides a PHP solution that addresses the entire Web application life cycle, from development to production."

"Zend Studio 7.0 adds many new features and enhancements to ease development and increase performance of Web application development," the company said in its news release. Key new features in include point-and-click coding, enhanced integration with Zend Server and support for PHP 5.3.

Zend Studio is built on the Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools) 2.1 open-source software, a project led by Zend.

Jon Whitcraft, lead application developer for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, said in Zend's statement, "Zend Studio is hands down our PHP IDE of choice for our high-traffic Websites, such as indy500.com. The upgrade from Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.1 to 7.0 is significant, as our team can now rapidly build out our Zend Framework-based applications and easily deploy them on Zend Server to further boost performance and ease of maintenance."