Second Annual Zend Conference Focuses on Strength and Proliferation of PHP
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Zend Technologies Announces Major Product Updates and New Industry Collaborations
ZEND/PHP CONFERENCE AND EXPO, San Jose, CA - October 31, 2006 - At the Zend/PHP Conference, Zend Technologies shared details of new and updated products for creating the next generation of web applications, and also unveiled a strategic relationship with Microsoft that will extend the reach of PHP, the world's most widely used web programming language. The company also demonstrated its commitment to the development of the open source projects Zend Framework and PHP Eclipse Project by showcasing critical milestones achieved in the projects, and rolled out new collaboration agreements with Google, IBM and MySQL to enable greater integration of PHP applications across a wide array of platforms.
"2006 was a landmark year for the proliferation of PHP in large companies, leading Web innovators and government agencies around the world," said Zend co-CTO and co-founder Zeev Suraski. "Our recent partnerships and product announcements will further help in making PHP the de-facto standard for web development, and will let companies fully leverage web innovation for business value."
"Today, over four million web developers are using PHP for millions of websites globally. We started this conference to provide a forum for learning and information exchange, from the individual developer to the top executives at some of the largest companies in the world," said Zend co-CTO and co-founder Andi Gutmans. "Zend is galvanizing the PHP ecosystem and driving development of products to further enrich this community."
Collaborations with Microsoft and MySQL
Microsoft and Zend announced a technical collaboration to enhance the experience of running the PHP scripting language on Windows Server® 2003 and the next version of Windows Server, code-named "Longhorn." The cooperative effort seeks to provide customers with richer functionality and better integration, resulting in improved performance and increased reliability.
Zend also announced an agreement with MySQL AB that will enable it to better integrate the popular open source database with Zend products, including the option of full integration.
"Zend aims to make it very easy to deploy reliable and high performance PHP 5 across all leading computing platforms, and improving integration with MySQL and Windows was high on our list of priorities," said Mark de Visser, Zend's chief marketing officer. "Starting in the first quarter of 2007, we intend to use the improved PHP technologies in our Zend Core product line, Zend's certified PHP distribution."
New Products and Enhancements
New milestone releases of Zend Framework and the PHP Eclipse project were announced, along with Zend Studio 5.5 and an update to Zend Core for IBM that makes it compatible with the latest version of DB2 and adds support for the Informix Dynamic Server (IDS). A new product called ZendBox(TM), a fully hosted and managed PHP 5 Technology stack was also announced.
o Zend has released an update to Zend Core for IBM, which implements support for IBM's DB2 Version 9 and Informix Dynamic Server 10 (IDS). DB2 9 is a leading edge hybrid data server capable of supporting both relational and pureXML(TM) storage. New features increase performance and scalability for both XML and relational data.
Zend Core for IBM can be freely downloaded from Zend's website, and includes IBM DB2 Express-C 9, a fully functional edition of DB2 version 9.
o The latest pre-release version of Zend Framework provides the foundation for building websites based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. The implementation is designed to be lightweight, modular and flexible, consistent with the philosophy driving all design of this open source PHP framework.
Zend announced that Zend Framework has now been downloaded more than 200,000 times and has 115 registered contributors.
Among the new functionality in Zend Framework is an implementation of Google's Data API that provides a simple standard protocol for PHP applications to read and write data to and from Google applications such as Google Base and Google Calendar. The Zend Google Data PHP Client Library was jointly developed by Zend and Google.
o Zend announced that the PHP Eclipse project is on track for general release in June 2007. The project is working toward providing a framework for PHP developer tools for the Eclipse platform. This project will encompass all development components necessary to develop PHP-based web applications and will facilitate extensibility.
Announced at the Zend/PHP Conference last year, the pre-release version of the PHP Eclipse project is being downloaded up to 40,000 times per month.
o Zend also announced version 5.5 of Zend Studio, the leading IDE for professional PHP developers. Zend Studio 5.5 introduces tight PHP - Java integration, support for Zend Framework, and improved source code management.
o Zend announced ZendBox(TM), a fully hosted and managed dedicated server running the latest PHP 5 Technology stack, including Zend Core, Zend Framework and Zend Platform. ZendBox provides a complete and easy to deploy solution for the operation and management of business-critical PHP applications.
ZendBox will help companies save time, effort and money by offering an easy to deploy, tightly integrated and certified combination of hardware, operating system, PHP 5 and utilities, all optimized to deliver superior performance for PHP applications and backed by the expert support of Zend and Zend's partner network of tier-one hosting providers.
Zend further stated that it reached an agreement with Rackspace to be the first provider of managed hosting services for the ZendBox.
About Zend
Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications. PHP is used by more than twenty-two million Web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic web applications. Deployed at more than 15,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Zend Technologies, Inc. is headquartered in Cupertino, California. For more information, please visit www.zend.com, or call 1-408-253-8800.
