In the spirit of the Zend Framework, we did another anti-release this weekend. Why anti-release? In the commercial world doing a product release on the weekend is a big no-no, but the framework team seems to always converge towards a weekend; and we believe there's no reason to delay a release in order to have "better" timing. In fact, releasing on a weekend has some advantages. There are many community members who have some spare time to provide quick feedback if there has been a mess up, and that makes it easier to "tweak" things towards the beginning of the week. Also, and in contrast, we have found the Zend Framework community to be very quick to pick up such releases, even on the weekend. I think that truly shows the vibrant community and interest that this project has created.
Enough blabbing about anti-releases and onto the real news...
Zend Framework 0.6 is a hugely important release for us. First of all, as the jump in version number reflects, this release really signals how much the Zend Framework has matured over the past few months. Some important signs of this maturity is the very much improved controller architecture which has been based on the experiences and feedback of the community who helped us understand some of the shortcomings in the initial versions, it includes better (and hopefully final) designs for ACL and Session handling, a new Authentication module, a great amount of i18n work which will hopefully move to core for 0.7, and a huge amount of additional features, improvements and bug fixes.
Also, I'm very excited to mention that Zend Framework 0.6 now features the official PHP 5 Google Gdata module. Google have been generous enough to donate this component to the Zend Framework, and we are including it both in the framework itself and making it available separately for download at http://framework.zend.com/download/gdata.
As one of our goals for the framework is to have good Web Services support, whether for generic Web Services such as REST, SOAP and XML-RPC or concrete Web Services like Gdata, Amazon or Flickr, having this as part of the framework is very much in sync with our goal.
So where do we go from here? We have posted a roadmap which details our plans. We're aiming to do at least monthly preview release in order to stay on track with this roadmap. We have also posted a more detailed Google Spreadsheet on the status of the various pieces. While we still expect some slight changes in the roadmap, taking into account community feedback and contributions, we believe that the final first version of the framework won't be far away from this roadmap. As already mentioned in the past, we are going to be focusing almost solely on this roadmap until we ship a 1.0 in order to ensure that we release a good solid first version. Once that happens, it will be easier for us to go back and deal with the overwhelming amount of good proposals we've received from the community. Naturally there will be some flexibility for proposals which are straightforward and have a strong code base and maintainer (such as the ones listed in the "Opportunistic improvements" section of the roadmap) but those will be more the exception than the rule.
For a more graphical view of what we expect Zend Framework 1.0 to be (give or take a few details) please see the following chart which I believe articulates it quite well:
I'd like to thank everyone who has helped make this important release happen. Foremost the community who has made significant contributions and provided invaluable feedback, the official Zend team that has worked late evenings and weekends on this release, and the unofficial Zend team which are Zenders who contribute in their spare time in addition to their existing full-time jobs.
No time to waste... Tomorrow we start working on 0.7...
Happy Holidays to everyone!
