| Zend Framework Plugs Holes in Major New Release | | Print | |
| Thursday, 13 March 2008 | |
|
Zend is releasing the next major version of the Zend Framework, with the new 1.5 version literally filling in a number of blanks, starting with forms. According to CTO and co-founder Andi Gutmans, prosaic features such as incorporating the plumbing for forms filling and processing, plus publishing more educational and best practices content, led the wish lists of developers attending Zend’s first major user conference last fall. Zend Framework 1.5, which comes approximately 9 months and million downloads after the 1.0 release, targets a wide range of gaps – which probably isn't surprising as it is only the second major release. For instance, it adds the plumbing to incorporate wildcard, date range, and fuzzy searches via the Apache Lucene search engine, so PHP developers don't have to drop into Java to incorporate it. It also adds more support for Ajax-style development, with expanding on the limited support of model-view-controller (MVC) from the 1.0 version by adding the ability to parse business from presentation logic for incoming Ajax requests for common interactions such as auto-complete.Of course, as we write a cheap headline for this, we have to acknowledge support of Google’s new YouTube web services APIs, which let you embed YouTube videos as a service in your PHP web application. On a related note, Google has contributed APIs to their GData data services to the framework. And dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s – or at least their Kanji or Cyrillic equivalents – Zend has added support of Unicode UTF-8 character sets as part of its Adobe PDF document creatin module. The new framework will be bundled with Ubuntu Linux, which is significant because it is a popular desktop Linux distribution among developers. In essence, this was a scattershot release, trying to satisfy a wide range of constituencies and, as an early release, trying to plug a lot of holes. For instance, Zend wanted to at least attack a few common use cases for Ajax to get some traction here, but going forward, features such as auto-complete are likely to be expanded on. And given the newness of the offering, there is demand for more information on how to use it, which accounts for demand for best practices and tutorials, an area that was hotly requested last fall and will likely be one of the main focuses of the new rev. Nonetheless, trying to get better control of the beast, Gutmans indicates that Zend might look to issuing smaller, but more frequent releases of the framework. Of course, since 1.0 hit the streets last July, there have been four mini-releases addressing bug fixes and related matters. Although nothing’s set in stone for the next go-round, Gutmans indicates that Zend might be open to doing a smaller 1.6 rather than a full-blown 2.0 release for the next iteration so they can more agilely keep pace with demand.             |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|