We are happy to relay the news that you will find everywhere these days: the Zend Framework has just been released in a stable version. We have been looking closely at this project since its early days, and we believe that its going 1.0 is good news for the PHP community in general. It means that another popular library showcases professional coding practices like unit testing, API documentation and coherent naming – and PHP can only benefit from having more professional projects.

The Zend Framework provides a lot of useful classes to handle communication with Flickr, del.icio.us, and so on. It has a PHP implementation of the Lucene search engine, and many other utilities that you may need one day or another for your web applications. You can use any of the classes provided by the the Zend Framework in your symfony applications thanks to the Zend Framework Bridge.

# in apps/myapp/config/settings.yml
all:
  .settings:
    autoloading_functions:
      - [sfZendFrameworkBridge, autoload]

While the Zend Framework reaches its 1.0 version, we are currently witnessing a new phase in the life of the symfony project. Some of the latest symfony plugins provide complete functionality (you can find plugins to build a Blog, a Forum, or a Media Library) and building a symfony application looks more and more like playing Lego. Besides, the core of the framework has been partly rewritten to make it even easier for you to tweak and override the core classes. This is good news for symfony 1.1, which should be released by the end of the summer.

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