Zend Technologies has announced a major new release of Zend Studio, the company’s leading integrated development environment (IDE) for the dynamic PHP language. Designed to dramatically improve productivity for professional-grade Web application development, Zend Studio 7.0 features support for the newly-released PHP V5.3 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,” said Andi Gutmans, CEO and co-founder of Zend Technologies. “Zend Studio, together with Zend Framework and Zend Server, provides a PHP solution that addresses the entire Web application lifecycle, from development to production.”

Zend Studio is a leading PHP IDE, providing a complete, professional-grade environment to maximize PHP developer productivity. Built on the Zend-led Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) 2.1 open source software – currently the most popular Eclipse project–Zend Studio is an IDE for developers that encompasses all the capabilities needed to build professional-grade business applications. In addition, Zend Studio customers benefit from the huge ecosystem of solutions available to the Eclipse community.

Zend Studio 7.0 adds many new features and enhancements to ease development and increase performance of Web application development. Indicative of customer interest, the beta version has been downloaded from the Zend Website ( http://www.zend.com ) over 20,000 times since it was released last month.

Key new features in Zend Studio 7.0 include:

• Support for PHP 5.3: Zend Studio 7.0 is a complete IDE for the new PHP version 5.3. Zend Studio’s support for 5.3 features makes for easier maintenance and more concise code with code assist, new syntax highlighting, and new language features in PHP 5.3, such as namespaces and closures, which allow programmers to better organize their code and use more dynamic coding patterns.
• Point-and-click Zend Framework coding: Better integration with Zend Framework, the leading PHP development framework, delivers more productive engineering with rapid application development (RAD) programming, enabling point-and-click creation of standards-based, customizable, professional-grade Zend Framework applications.
• Enhanced integration with Zend Server: Zend Studio 7.0’s support for Zend Server -- Zend’s Web application server for deploying, managing and monitoring PHP Web applications--delivers significantly faster and more reliable software. Zend Server maximizes PHP application reliability, security, and performance in the enterprise with ongoing application monitoring, security fixes, product updates and event notifications.

For more information about the new features and functionality in Zend Studio 7.0, please go to http://www.zend.com/products/studio

Jon Whitcraft, lead application developer for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, commented, “Zend Studio is hands down our PHP IDE of choice for our high traffic Web sites, 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.”

In other news, Zend  announced that Zend Framework 1.9 is now available and includes PHP 5.3 and 5.2 support, plus new and enhanced professional level features for Web application development. For more detail, please go here: http://tinyurl.com/zendframework1-9-0announced