Friday, December 05, 2008

1o million downloads and counting. . .

That's right. Zend Framework has been downloaded 10 million times. And hopefully I'll be announcing 100 million downloads here soon, since the download rate continues to grow exponentially or almost so :)

When I started the Zend Framework project back in 2005 I was sure that we could make a difference. Some thought it was a long shot with too ambitious goals, after all I wanted to start from scratch without a single line of code, no community contributors and no corporate contributors. We are now 3.5 years later and I have to say Zend Framework's success has exceeded my own foresight and expectations. The download numbers are only a reflection of the success we've seen with Zend Framework; after all we can't really count anymore as we are available via Ubuntu, Fedora, hosting providers, Zend products, etc... And there are only more of these on the way... Yes, by the end of next year it may very well be 100 million but I doubt we will be able to continue counting much longer.

There are lots of people behind the success of ZF. The team at Zend - present and past, our technology partners incl. IBM, Google, Adobe, Microsoft and others, and -last but not least- our large community of contributors and users. I just hope that everyone else is having as much fun with this project as we are.

Although it is not the new year quite yet this is a great way for us to end 2008; and the project is still young having been GA for less than a year and a half!

One closing side note: there will be a new webinar available from the Adobe site on Zend_Amf which will cover the current state of the component and future plans. This is something you won't want to miss if you're interested in building RIA's in PHP.

Happy ZF'ing!