In addition to that, Wil & I will be presenting at the San Francisco PHP Meetup group, a recently rejuvenated user group in the Bay Area here that has close to a hundred participants attending every month for the past couple of months in the vibrant South of Market (SoMa) area of the City. If you’re nearby or in town the first Thursday of any month, be sure to drop by. Michael Tougeron has been doing an excellent job hosting this at his employer’s venue, CNET (Thanks CNET!), which has a nice big room, some snacks to chow on, and double screens overhead for easy viewing of PHP scripts and anything else we want to discuss.

This month Wil & I present–according to Cal at Zend DevZone, some wacky antics–around the new 1.5 release of Zend Framework. Hope to see you there!

We’ve been reading every feedback,  tried to reproduce the bugs, analyze the feature request and come up with a better product based on that.

Zend Studio for Eclipse introduce a new level of features which makes the development experience smoother and shorter. Some of the features are:

• Refactoring - Some people call it smart Find and Replace in files, others familiar with it from Java development. What i’m sure that this feature is a must when you want to rename a PHP element and you want to do it smartly with minimum side effects.
• Code Generation - No doubt that writing getters and setters for your PHP Class variables is important but a boring and time consuming task. What would you say if Zend Studio for Eclipse would do that for you in just 3 clicks (Right click, Source -> Generate Getters and Setters and Finish). If you’re picky in what you want to generate it might take 3 more seconds. Very efficient. You can generate also PHP Class or Interface skeleton, Zend Framework Controllers and more.
• PHPUnit Testing - We all heard about Test Driven Development but we are not sure how to implement it. On the other hand we might have a web application and we want to test its units to make sure it doesn’t break every time we change something. PHPUnit Testing in Zend Studio for Eclipse provides an easy way to create new Test Cases, Test Suites, run tests and get a visual summary of a the test results including an option to export it to HTML or XML.

There are great amount of new features available in the new release of Zend Studio for Eclipse which will make you a happy and efficient PHP developer.

Stay tuned!

Yossi Leon

The Zend Framework team is delighted to announce that the official release process for Zend Framework 1.5 has begun! Since the 1.5 is a substantial release, we’ve decided to kick things off with a preview release to put all the new functionality in the community’s hands as early as possible. This release will be followed by as many release candidates as are needed to meet the high quality standards of the ZF project. Features to be released in Zend Framework 1.5 include, but are not necessarily limited to:


* Zend_Auth_Adapter_Ldap
* Zend_Build/Zend_Console
* Zend_Controller additional action helpers, including ContextSwitch/AjaxContext, Json, and AutoComplete
* Zend_Form
* Zend_InfoCard
* Zend_Layout
* Zend_OpenId
* Zend_Search_Lucene improvements, including wildcard search, date range search, fuzzy search, and Lucene 2.1 index file format support
* Zend_View enhancements, including actions, partials, and placeholders
* Zend_Pdf UTF8 support
* New Zend_Service consumables (final list TBD)
* A whole lotta bug fixes and documentation improvements

For all the gory details, take a look at all the 1.5 issues in our issue tracker. The first two significant dates have already been set. The code freeze for the preview release is 1/22, while the targeted release date is 1/24. If everything goes well the first release candidate will follow in about 3 weeks. From that point on, release candidates will be produced as needed to reach the quality level necessary for a general availability (GA) release.

Please keep in mind that the preview release is fundamentally different from an initial release candidate. For example, there is no guarantee that the API’s will not change or that features will not be added or dropped before the first release candidate is cut. Generally speaking, the more feedback we get from the community for the preview release and the release candidates, the sooner we’ll reach the GA release.

I hope all of you are as excited about this as we are. Many thanks to everyone who has helped us get to this point- especially to all of you who have generously donated your time to contribute to Zend Framework. Let’s make this the best release yet!

Zend Framework 1.0.3 was selected as a finalist for the 2007 Jolt Awards, to be awarded at Software Development West in March 2008.

Great job! (Congrats to Cal Evans and the Zend DevZone team who are also finalists for web sites/developer networks.)

The finalists for the Libraries, Frameworks, and Components category, along with their sponsoring organizations, are:

Eclipse Modeling Project
Eclipse

Guice
Google Inc

JasperReports
JasperSoft

Qt Jambi
Trolltech

Spring Framework
SpringSource

Zend Framework
Zend Technologies

Great job, everyone!

So this is my roundabout way of announcing that we’ve decided to name the next release of Zend Framework ‘1.5′. First off, I don’t want people to get too hung up on the name. We were faced with the dilemma of having a release that included far too many essential changes to be deemed a regular minor release, while we wanted to reserve the major release revisions for larger breaks in backwards-compatibility. ‘1.5′ seemed to be a reasonable compromise. With major stories in command line tooling, forms, and authentication among other major improvements in PDF and Lucene search, the scope of 1.5 was significantly larger than what we hope our standard minor release would amount to considering that we would prefer to make new features available to all of our users as often as possible. Ultimately, we chose this version name because what is going in to the 1.5 release is substantial, and- if we can trust our good friend Shakespeare- this is much more important than whatever it happens to be called.

I hope you’re looking forward to Zend Framework 1.5 as much as I am!

‘Remind me: why do we need another feed reader again?’ you’re probably wondering right now. Well, this application seems squarely aimed at those of us to whom the blogosphere has largely been confined to a one-way medium for shear lack of time or knowledge. That is to say, while I might have the time to update my personal blog (and even occasionally this one) and read a select few blogs on a regular basis, I almost never find the time to dig up blog entries from the unfiltered blogosphere that might interest me- much less leave a comment if/when I do find one. This AJAX application solves both problems elegantly by providing a concept of ’slices’ which allow the user to hone in on entries that might interest them and an inline comment editor to leave your mark. Yes, all this can be done with a combination of Technorati and the blogging applications themselves, but fav.or.it makes it easy enough for the novice and time constrained to more actively participate in the wonderful world of blogs. You can even edit your own blog from their interface.

Now we see that they’ve added ‘mashup editor’ to the list of features. Well, I have to say that I found it compelling before I saw the mashup editor, and I hope this doesn’t delay general availability for the feed reader/comment editor.

By the way, I’ve been saving the best for last. It’s all written in Zend Framework!

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 (more…)

I’ve created bunch of videos about the different features of Zend Studio for Eclipse Beta.

Each video is 3-4 minutes long, so you don’t need to spend the entire afternoon on that.

Check them out at:

http://www.zend.com/products/zend_studio/eclipse/videos

Enjoy,

Yossi Leon

The next up-coming event, which is more open source rather than commercial like, is OS Summit Asia 2007.

It’s the first time for this kind of event, in terms of Apache and Eclipse join together for one event, and it’s taking place in Asia as well.

If you look at the interest of Eclipse in the world, you can easily see that China, Japan and other Asian countries take great portion in it, so it’s not surprising having a conference there.

I will be speaking there about the harmony between Apache, Eclipse and PDT.

Talk with your bosses and take part in this great event. It’s going to be amazing!

See you there,

Yossi Leon.

Update - The conference was postponed to next year, stay tuned - OSSummit 2008