May 04, 2009
Zend Framework Updated
Version 1.8 delivers Rapid Application Development (RAD) for PHP and programming support for Amazon cloud
Zend Technologies has announced Zend Framework 1.8, freely available as part of the Zend Server product. The project is an open, collaborative web application framework for PHP development and deployment that includes contributions from the open source community and Zend partners.
Cloud programming support for Amazon's infrastructure is now also a part of Zend Framework, with both S3 (simple storage service) and EC2 (elastic compute cloud) components to help users quickly build web applications to both store and serve data, and to manage application instances in the Amazon cloud. Cloud deployment means less upfront investment is needed by organizations seeking to leverage utility computing and scalable services and making some classes of web applications easier to scale and faster to develop.
Specific Zend Framework 1.8 features include:
- Rapid application prototyping via the Zend_Tool component. It provides an advanced infrastructure for generating and managing Zend Framework applications. While Zend_Tool comes with a command-line client, its additional remote procedure call-based (RPC) interface allows tooling components to be consumed via other RPC clients that may be custom-built for a user's business need. Additionally, while developers may use the provided functionality, they may also drop in their own tooling classes for Zend_Tool to auto-discover and consume.
- Zend Framework 1.8 adds components that support Amazon Web Services S3 and EC2, providing developers with the ability to both store and serve data redundantly for their applications as well as manage virtual machines in Amazon's elastic compute cloud.
- Zend Server backend for Zend Framework (ZF). Use the Zend_Cache ZF component for Zend Server's caching API to dramatically improve the performance of your PHP applications.
- Re-usable and extensible application bootstrapping and initialization using Zend_Application. This component provides an object-oriented and configuration-driven mechanism for setting up a PHP environment, for autoloading library code, and for application startup, making it very easy to create reusable and selective resource initialization routines for your particular application.
- Internationalization with translation-aware web address routing by using locale-specific URLs in your Zend Framework MVC applications, plus locale support in numeric validation components, phone code support for locales, and support for filtering localized data to a normalized form and vice versa.
