Zend Framework: Launch, ZendCon, Roadmap, and ZF 1.5

Zend Framework 1.0 launched at the beginning of July and since then we’ve had two mini-releases (1.01 & 1.02), with 1.03 coming up in a week or so. Congratulations are due to the entire Zend Framework community who has risen to the challenge of embracing, promoting, and most importantly, using Zend Framework for getting real work done.

Though I may be the one with evangelist listed on my business card here at Zend, the entire Zend team works hard to be evangelists and spread the word on ZF and it’s a job requirement that we’re all involved with the community: speaking, meeting, and yes, emailing many of you helping to make ZF so great.

When Mark de Visser (my boss) last posted on Zend Framework, we had over 1 million clicks on our download link & SVN server and it looked likely that we would have 2 million by year-end. Since then, the enthusiasm and interest in ZF has grown beyond what the community and ZF core team at Zend could have hoped for. We are now well over 2.7 million downloads and are on track for more than 3 million by year end! Safe to say that hundreds of thousands of PHP programmers worldwide are vetting, using, learning, and building on top of Zend Framework.

There are many partnerships we have formed that help make Zend Framework more valuable to adopters who have placed their confidence in the ZF community and ecosystem. Our Zend-Google partnership continues to grow, with progress on continuing to enhance Google GData APIs in ZF.

In addition to Google, Zend announced at our annual PHP conference (ZendCon) last month a number of items that should interest the Zend Framework & PHP community: IBM formally released a strategic application for them worldwide: QEDWiki and their Mashup Starter Kit–written on top of Zend Framework. Microsoft and Zend announced that we would build support for Information Card formats (to allow users to present Information Cards–yes, like Microsoft CardSpace cards–to ZF enabled web sites; I should mention that ZF is also going to support OpenID). Other announcements include enhanced high-performance support for FastCGI & PHP on IIS and Windows Server as well as Oracle’s announcement of connection-pooling providing massive improvements for PHP developers deploying with Oracle.

Finally, I’d like to point out our future roadmap for Zend Framework. This is important to everyone in the community, especially those who have worked hard on proposals they would like to contribute to ZF. As noted on the Zend Framework web site and in presentations by Andi Gutmans and others, our roadmap for the near-term consists of four main areas: Forms support, Web Services (there are almost a dozen proposed new web services, plus half a dozen already under review, ready for review, or in the incubator– if you want web services, get your proposals in!), additional enhancements to our Lucene search implementation, and of course (we’ve heard this loud & clear!) more tutorials, help, sample code, etc.

While not all of the above will make it into Zend Framework 1.1 (update: now version 1.5 to make it clear how much more substantial this release will be over a standard +0.1 ‘minor’ release), many features will and our timeframe for delivering 1.1 1.5 will be during the first quarter of 2008.

Many more tutorials, example code, and sample apps could come from the community at large (hint, hint). Anyone with ideas, suggestions, and working code with unit tests–preference given to the latter :^) is encouraged to contact any member of the Zend team working on Zend Framework, including yours truly!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!