Zend Framework 1.0 Ready To Compete


Since its inception 11 years ago, PHP has been a language for the Web. Now with the release of the Zend Framework 1.0 today, PHP becomes a language for Web applications and Web services enterprise applications.


Zend Framework 1.0 is an open source framework for PHP that brings it in
closer competition with JavaEE and .NET than ever before.


The effort began
back in October of 2005
with the first public development release appearing in
March of 2006
. Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans claims that they have had
over 1 million downloads since the first Zend Framework development build
was released, have received contributions from over 230 developers and had the support of both IBM and Google. Zend is one of the lead commercial sponsors of PHP development.


“The adoption that we’ve seen pre-release has amazed us, we didn’t plan for
that,” Gutmans told internetnews.com.


Gutmans also noted that the level of contributions that the project has
received also exceed expectations. One such example cited by Gutmans was
documentation.


“Documentation was important for us when we began the effort, but we didn’t
imagine that we’d have 16 translations; we were just planning on English. A
lot of things like that happened,” Gutmans said.


At the heart of the Zend Frameworks are the framework components which aim
to make it easier and faster to deploy Web applications and take advantage
of Web Services. Among the components in the framework is the GData
component which enables the framework to create mash-ups  and better utilize
Google components that use GData. Zend Framework also has support for
Amazon, Flickr and Yahoo APIs under the Zend_Service module.


Gutmans expects that over time Zend Framework will organically end up in
Linux distributions, much the same as PHP is now included in all versions of
Linux. Beyond Linux, Gutmans said Zend is working with Microsoft as part of a deal inked last year and as such Zend Framework will work on the Windows
platform as well.


Out of the gate, IBM will be using Zend Framework in its QEDWiki
application
and Gutmans expects that many other ISVs  will redistribute
Zend Framework as well.


IBM  is also working with the Zend Framework community on further extending
the JSON support available to PHP developers. Zend_Xml2Json
will be a server component that enables XML to JSON conversion at the
middleware server layer. Gutmans said the component is not in the 1.0 release but he expects to be including it in a future 1.1 release once it’s production-ready.


Also on the future roadmap is AJAX tooling for the Zend framework. Gutmans first explained the AJAX tool at the
AjaxWorld Conference
earlier this year. When completed, the
Zend component model Ajax tool will be a full development environment
complete with drag-and-drop components, cross-language debugging and
advanced CSS support. Gutmans noted that it will still take more time for
that functionality and that it would likely come even later than a 1.1
release.


Ultimately it is the continued participation of contributors and ISVs that
Gutmans expects will help grow the framework, both in terms of feature and
adoption.


“The health of the partner and development ecosystem and our ability to
build the ecosystem will be our main success metric,” Gutmans said.

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