Zend Technologies (www.zend.com) together with the PHP community announced the availability of PHP 5. PHP is an open source, server side scripting language that allows the design of dynamic web pages, is used in more than 15 million web sites and registers 10,000 new downloads each month. The company said that PHP 5 updates included a major new release of Zend Engine, support for object-oriented development, XML processing advancements and the addition of web services support. According to Zend, PHP 5 is the most significant upgrade to the scripting language since the first edition of Zend Engine in 1997.
Zeev Suraski, co-founder and chief technical officer of Zend said that since the release of the Zend Engine, PHP’s maturity as a dynamic web language had been validated by tens of millions of organizations that have installed it. However, he noted that through Zend’s conversations with thousands of developers, the company realized that PHP needed to evolve further to meet the needs of large web application projects. Suraski added that enhancements to this release truly delivered the benefits of PHP to large enterprises and made the language robust enough to power applications of varying levels of complexity and criticality.
