CUPERTINO, USA: Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP Company, has announced a new version 1.8 release of Zend Framework.

The project is an open, collaborative web application framework for PHP development and deployment that includes contributions from the open source community and Zend partners.

Rapid application development (RAD) is now possible with Zend Framework 1.8’s automated and customizable creation of PHP-based web applications. This feature lets users create their own standards and processes for specific business needs when creating Zend Framework-based applications.

Cloud programming support for Amazon’s infrastructure is now also a part of Zend Framework, with both S3 (simple storage service) and EC2 (elastic compute cloud) components to help users quickly build web applications to both store and serve data, and to manage application instances in the Amazon cloud.

“With true customizable RAD programming for PHP as well as support for cloud-based development, Zend Framework is the premier choice for businesses who are wanting to develop and deploy web applications in the quickest way possible,” said Zeev Suraski, co-founder and chief technology officer at Zend Technologies.

“Zend Framework is clearly the most popular PHP framework for professional use in the industry today and the timing could not have been better with the availability of Zend Server released earlier this month, users can deploy our enterprise-grade framework and additionally get the performance and reliability of our new web application server,” Suraski continued.

Zend Framework is freely available as part of the recently announced Zend Server, as well as in a standalone download, and is supported by Zend Studio and Zend Server integration points for both development and deployment phases of the web application lifecycle.

Zend Studio’s built-in support allows users to easily code and customize their Zend Framework application in development, and specific Zend Framework performance enhancements in Zend Server enable easy, reliable, and high speed deployment in production.