Adobe to contribute AMF support to Zend Framework

Adobe has made a proposal for an AMF (Action Message Format) component in Zend Framework. This ZF component will allow for client-side applications built with Flex and Adobe AIR to communicate easily and efficiently with PHP on the server-side. Leading the design of the component for Adobe is Wade Arnold. Wade already has a track record of bringing the Adobe RIA technologies to PHP as a result of all of his work on AMFPHP.

We are excited about this proposal as it is consistent with our emphasis to be a heterogeneous “use-at-will” framework and as it substantially strengthens Zend Framework’s RIA story. It is also another industry heavyweight joining as an official ZF contributor and joining the likes of IBM, Google and Microsoft in doing so.

Now that we have the Dojo integration ready for ZF 1.6 as a great Ajax story, AMF will complement that with more of an Enterprise oriented solution. We are currently planning to have AMF support aligned with the ZF 1.7 release but we will know better once the proposal has made it through the proposal process. Adobe’s software has some significant strengths including WYSIWYG tooling with their Flex Builder product, multimedia support and a way to bridge Web technologies to the desktop with Adobe AIR.  With this integration Zend Framework users will enjoy the best of both worlds: Dojo as a broadly adopted open-standards Ajax solution supported by literally all popular browsers and operating systems and Adobe’s RIA solutions which are the most ubiquitous commercially driven RIA technologies.  And best of all, Dojo and Adobe have actually worked together to make sure that Dojo runs well in Adobe AIR (http://dojotoolkit.org/air) so we see these technologies can also work nicely together.

Adobe, welcome to the Zend Framework family… We are glad to have you on board.

ZF Well Represented at SourceForge Awards

SourceForge will be presenting its community choice awards at OSCON again this year. The Zend Framework team will be watching closely, since no fewer than two (!) new ZF-based projects have made it in to the finals: Magento and Tine 2.0.

Magento has been taking the eCommerce software world by storm. We’ve been hearing a lot about Magento as a well-designed and well-executed software product, but you’ve got to hand it to the Magento team for awesome community-focused resources like Magento Connect. I can only assume they built this stuff with all the development time ZF saved them. ;) Magento is a finalist in the following categories: Best Project for the Enterprise, Best New Project, Most Likely to Change the World & Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition. Make sure you put in your vote here. Congrats, guys!

Tine 2.0 is another big enterprise-oriented project, but focused on the intranet and collaboration. It’s also a full rewrite of the popular eGroupWare project using Zend Framework to improve maintainability and stability, among other things. Tine 2.0 is a finalist in the Best New Project category. Way to go!

One of our goals in building ZF was to provide a solid foundation upon which other project teams could build great software. I think Magento and Tine 2.0 are proof that we’ve had some impact here. It’s particularly nice to see the warm reception of ZF as a foundation for PHP best practices in the OS community. Who knows? Maybe next year you’ll be able to vote for ZF itself.

Good luck to both projects!

[Thanks to Wil Sinclair for contributing content for this post]