Zend Hosts Third Annual Zend/PHP Conference and Announces New Products and Partner Initiatives

Business Wire, Oct 9, 2007

New Eclipse-Based PHP IDE, New Version of Zend Core, and Announcements by IBM, Microsoft and Oracle Highlight Start of World's Largest PHP Conference

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Today at ZendCon, the third annual Zend/PHP Conference, Zend took significant steps to further advance PHP's capabilities as the premier platform for business-critical web applications. In a series of announcements, the company shared details about deeper integration with products from IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, enhancements to the Zend version of PHP, and an all-new offering for developers who want to create PHP applications using Eclipse.

ZendCon is the largest gathering of its kind for the PHP community and for companies using PHP to build and deploy business-critical web applications. It is an important meeting place for an ecosystem that includes the world's largest software companies, innovative web start-ups and leading-edge developers from more than 30 countries. Business application modernization, state-of-the-art graphical web applications, web service development, Web 2.0, mash-ups and user identity management are some of the over 50 sessions being led by an elite corps of business and software experts.

Today's announcements underscore Zend's commitment to creating the world's best products that support commercial use of PHP, as well as its ongoing contribution to the open source PHP project and community of over 4.5 million PHP developers. The announcements include:

* Zend Studio for Eclipse - The all-new commercial PHP IDE for Eclipse with immediate availability of a downloadable beta version

* Zend Core 2.5 - Immediate availability of the new version of Zend's production grade PHP

* IBM releases the IBM Mashup Starter Kit, based on Zend Core, Zend Framework and DB2

* Single source support from Zend for DB2 and Zend Core

* Delivery by Microsoft of a new FastCGI module to improve PHP performance on Windows

* Microsoft announces a new SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP

* Zend announces support for the Server Core option in Microsoft Windows Server 2008

* Collaboration between Zend and Microsoft to deliver support for the identity management (Information Card) in Zend Framework

* Oracle Announces PHP support for Connection Pooling in Oracle[R] Database 11g

"PHP's momentum and its rapid pace of innovation are driving high growth opportunities for everyone in the community, from individual developers to large corporate IT departments modernizing their business applications," said Harold Goldberg, Zend CEO. "I'm proud to see the diversity of talent gathered at ZendCon, and to be able to showcase the results of all the hard work done by the community, by our partner companies and by Zend."

Launch of Zend Studio for Eclipse

Zend announced Zend Studio for Eclipse, an all-new PHP Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that allows developers to take advantage of the sophisticated, feature-rich Eclipse framework. Zend Studio for Eclipse is a commercial product that builds on the recently announced open source Eclipse PDT project, and is aimed at speeding PHP development with a comprehensive set of editing, debugging, analysis, optimization and database tools. At the conference, Zend made a pre-release version available under the code name Neon. General availability is expected in early 2008.

Zend Core 2.5 released

Zend announced the immediate availability of Zend Core 2.5, strengthening PHP 5 for deployment of business critical web applications. Among the improvements in version 2.5 are simplified installation and maintenance of the full PHP application stack, including web server, databases, extensions and Zend Framework. Version 2.5 releases of Zend Core for IBM, Zend Core for i5/OS and Zend Core for Oracle will be available in the fourth quarter of 2007.

IBM releases the IBM Mashup Starter Kit

In a separate announcement made earlier today in Armonk NY, IBM introduced the IBM Mashup Starter Kit. The toolkit, available from the IBM Alphaworks website, enables non-technical business users to create sophisticated business applications by combining web services with drag-and-drop ease. The toolkit has been created with PHP 5, using Zend Core for IBM, Zend Framework and DB2 data servers.

Zend confirms availability of single source support for PHP and DB2

First announced in August, Zend is now offering a single source of support for PHP applications running on DB2 databases. This solution, which includes Zend Core for IBM and DB2 Express-C, can be extended with DB2 Connect technology to provide access to i5/OS and z/OS data servers.

Microsoft releases FastCGI for PHP

Last year at ZendCon, Microsoft and Zend announced a long-term collaboration agreement aimed at increasing the reliability and performance of PHP applications on Windows. Significant progress has been made on all of the announced projects, and many of the improvements have been accepted by the PHP open source project. Today, Microsoft announced that it has delivered on another commitment with the release of the GoLive beta of an Internet Information Services (IIS) add-on component, FastCGI. FastCGI serves as an interface between PHP and an IIS Web server delivering substantial reliability and performance benefits for PHP applications running on Windows. It is now available for free from Microsoft on http://www.iis.net/php.>