July 22, 2004

Zend Technologies announced earlier this week that it has released PHP version 5.0 together with the PHP community.

PHP, an open source, server side scripting language that helps create dynamic Web pages, is used in over 15 million Web sites, with 10,000 new downloads per month.

According to Zend, updates to PHP 5 include a major new release of the Zend Engine, support for object-oriented development, XML processing advancements and the addition of Web services support.

The company said the release is the most significant upgrade to the scripting language since the release of Zend Engine back in 1997.

"Since the release of the Zend Engine, PHP's maturity as a dynamic Web language has been validated by the tens of millions of organizations that have installed it," says Zeev Suraski, co-founder and chief technical officer of Zend.

"But, through our conversations with thousands of developers, we realized that PHP needed to evolve further to meet the needs of large web application projects.

Enhancements to this release truly deliver the benefits of PHP to large enterprises and make the language robust enough to power applications of varying levels of complexity and criticality."

Source: The WHIR