Zend Framework May Update...

Yesterday, May 15th, we released a maintenance release of Zend Framework. 49 issues were resolved in this 1.5.2 release. Thanks to all contributors and the ZF team who made this happen. This reinforces our commitment to high quality and we will continue to release periodic mini releases on an as needed basis.

Not only is the Zend Framework user base growing rapidly but we are also seeing a sharp rise in adoption of ZF in business-critical commercial applications. Recently we posted two new interesting case studies including one on Indianapolis Motor Speedway who standardized on Zend Framework and Zend products. Another interesting story is IGN Entertainment, a division of Fox Interactive Media, for who the ZF's use-at-will architecture was a key factor in making the choice of Zend Framework.

I am looking forward to php|tek where I will be giving the opening keynote this coming Wednesday. I will be talking about a variety of topics related to PHP, the eco-system and the broader market changes we are experiencing. I will also be talking about a new RIA related project we have been working on in the Zend Framework team. So stay tuned... For those who can't make it we will be putting out further information right after the keynote. And no, we are not building yet another JavaScript Toolkit :)

Last but not least we have just recently worked on improving our contribution process. We believe the new process will make it easier to contribute to Zend Framework while not having to compromise on quality. As a result we have also moved many proposals forward in the review process and I believe we will see a lot more code contributions in the coming weeks.

Until next time... Happy ZF'ing.

CommunityOne Talk - Technical Problems

My talk at CommunityOne was disappointing. I was planning to show a demo which demonstrates both some of the initial Zend Framework Ajax support and also a prototype of server-side push which we've been working on. Unfortunately Vista was unable to project. I have no idea why but it was constantly giving me errors. After about 15 minutes of the technical staff and myself not being able to resolve the issue I did the presentation sans-demo on a Sun machine which was running XP. Also as a result of not using my machine I didn't have ZoomIt available which made it hard for the audience to see the code I was showing.

The audience was very courteous though and waited for me to get started. It was also nice that about 50% where PHP users and about 50% had Web-based MVC experience. A balanced setup for a talk which covered PHP, Zend Framework and Ajax/PHP interoperability including scalability and server-side push.

Besides the technical difficulties the talk went fine but I am sure there was some disappointment in the audience.

I apologize for the inconvenience and am planning to put up the slides and a recorded version of the demo within the next couple of days on this blog so stay tuned. I'll also try and make sure I add a comment on the CommunityOne site once they are up if I manage to figure out how :)

In any case, for those who read my Upgrading to Windows XP blog post, my new Lenovo with pre-installed XP has already been ordered but it'll take 2-3 weeks to actually make it here.