Zend offers PHP development roadmap

Expected tomorrow (November 2), PHP 5.2 - the latest version of the popular open source scripting language will be announced by Zend Technologies.

Speaking at Zend / PHP Conference & Expo, Mr. Andi Gutmans, founder of Zend Technologies, said that PHP 5.2 will significantly improve application performance and expand security features. PHP 5.2 also upgraded AJAX technology, support for JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) extensions.

" The focus of the new upgrade is to allow developers to write security-style applications more easily with the full tools to do so, " Gutmans commented. As known, Zend is responsible for core development for the PHP platform.

Meanwhile, PHP 6.0 will focus primarily on globalization and Unicode support features. The "PHP 6.0" version is expected to be released in December, with a planned release of PHP 6.0 in 2007.

Version 3.0 of the Zend Platform (Zend's server application platform for PHP) will be available around February or March of next year. Zend Platform 3.0 will support 3 different server systems: performance servers; Enterprise server and integrated server.

Also in an effort to promote the development of Windows-based PHP applications, Zend expects to issue 12 fixes for the PHP community.

Also at Zend / PHP Conference & Expo, MySQL also revealed that its MySQL database will be distributed with Zend Core PHP. In addition, the link driver between MySQL and PHP is being developed, which is expected to be completed next year.