As Cal posted on devzone, Zend Framework was awarded the Jolt Productivity Award last week. Although Google Guice took first place this is still a great acknowledgment for how far the Zend Framework has come.
Thanks to its use-at-will architecture and flexibility we are seeing an increasing amount of business critical PHP applications being built on Zend Framework, both new and existing projects which are incrementally adopting it. As Wil likes to put it, Zend Framework is "opiniated software. Your opinion" :) In addition to strong adoption by smaller businesses and community based projects we are also seeing significant Enterprise uptake although we can't mention most of those yet in public.
We are very close to releasing Zend Framework 1.5 and are rolling Release Candidate 2 tomorrow. So far the feedback has been invaluable and thanks to the active community Zend Framework 1.5 has really made a lot of progress since the preview. In fact, the mailing list has been so active it's hard to keep-up (around 1500 emails in February alone). Stay tuned for the final release.
Thanks to all the contributors and the Zend Framework team for making Zend Framework what it is today. A huge amount of effort has gone into this project and it's very satisfying to see it pay off.
