Zend Technologies has announced the availability of version 1.5 of Zend Framework, a popular open-source development tool for building PHP applications. Zend Framework is also being made available in Ubuntu, a highly regarded Linux distribution with millions of users around the world. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS will include Zend Framework in its Universe repository, according to Zend. It is slated for release in April.

Zend announced it also is now offering a new Zend Framework subscription support service that includes consulting time for inquiries related to methodology and a guaranteed per-incident response time for addressing issues related to Zend Framework project code.

Google and Zend continue to deliver significant enhancements to Zend Framework, the company said. Support has been added for the new YouTube APIs, making it easy to upload, watch, search, and comment on YouTube videos on PHP Web sites.

Zend Framework is an open source project best known for its support for fast, efficient creation of PHP applications. It has developed a strong community and has attracted contributions from over 400 individual and corporate-sponsored developers, including Microsoft, Fox Interactive Media, IBM, and Google. Since its debut, Zend Framework has been downloaded more than four million times. It can be obtained from http://framework.zend.com/. For more information on the support service, visit: http://www.zend.com/en/services/support/zend-framework-support.

"With the Google Data APIs, we want to make it easy for developers to build innovative Web apps that integrate with Google products," said Tom Stocky, senior product manager for developer products at Google. "Zend and the open-sourced Zend Framework have made these APIs easily accessible to a wide range of PHP programmers," he said. "Today's release of Zend Framework 1.5 brings new capabilities such as YouTube's new upload and write APIs to millions of PHP programmers worldwide."

Malcolm Yates, ISV alliances manager for Ubuntu's corporate sponsor, Canonical Ltd. said, "Having an open source project of the scale of Zend Framework participating as a member of the Ubuntu community is very significant; Zend and Canonical both see strong traction for Ubuntu and PHP as a preferred way to develop and deploy modern Web applications," said Yates.

"We're really pleased that Zend Framework has reached a critical mass of acceptance from the community, which can be seen in the caliber of our contributors: Google, IBM, StrikeIron, and now with version 1.5, Microsoft, Fox Interactive Media, and Nirvanix," said Andi Gutmans, CTO and co-founder at Zend Technologies. "With this latest release, Zend continues to deliver on the promise of making PHP an accessible language for building modern Web applications and Web services of any scope, from startup Web 2.0 sites to major business critical enterprise Web applications."

IGN Entertainment, a division of Fox Interactive Media, is using Zend Framework to create a wide variety of content across its network of gaming, entertainment, and lifestyle Web properties.

"Zend Framework is incredibly effective for IGN because it does not impose its structure, and allows us to make our own architectural decisions," said Tony Ford, engineering manager of community sites for IGN Entertainment. "By choosing Zend Framework, we have been able to easily pick, integrate, and extend components-including the excellent MVC support-into other code that is helping to drive our new IGN Community Sites platform."

Zend Framework 1.5 now supports OpenID and Microsoft's InfoCard, two emerging user-centric technologies behind "Identity 2.0," a movement from the community to simplify and fortify identity management online. It also now supports LDAP authentication and the media content storage and delivery network from Nirvanix.

Additional features in Zend Framework 1.5 include support for several new services and enhancements to already popular features that make building modern Web sites easier and faster than ever. These include:

·       Forms-Zend Framework now supports forms, including Ajax usage patterns that make building and using Web-based forms much easier.

·       Layout and view-Layout support and view enhancements make it easier to implement a consistent look and feel throughout PHP applications and save developers time by keeping Web application views sorted by component.

·       LDAP authentication-Zend Framework now comes with enterprise-ready authentication through support for LDAP technology.

·       Lucene search engine-Now it is possible to implement advanced queries using wild cards, date ranges, and fuzzy searches from within a Zend Framework application.

·       Extended Ajax support-Zend Framework's server-side support for Ajax with action helpers to automate Ajax detection and responses, now make programming using JavaScript and PHP much easier.

·       UTF-8 character sets in Adobe PDF creation-Zend Framework's PDF support has been enhanced to enable non-Latin character sets such as Kanji, Cyrillic, and many others.

·       Google GData Web services-Significant enhancements to Google Data services now make it easier than ever to build Web applications that leverage the Google application network. New in Zend Framework 1.5 is support for upload and write capabilities to Google YouTube.

About Zend

Zend Technologies, Inc. is a leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying, and managing business-critical PHP applications. PHP is used by more than 20 million Web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic Web applications. Deployed at more than 15,000 companies worldwide, Zend's family of products provides a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Zend has its headquarters in Cupertino, California. For more information, visit www.zend.com, or call 1-408-253-8800.