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Sep. 17, 2008

IT solutions provider Zend announced says that it kicked off its fourth annual Zend/PHP Conference, the world's largest gathering of the PHP community and for companies using PHP technology to build business-critical Internet applications.

To be held September 15 to 18 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California, the Conference will see the gathering of the largest software companies, innovative web start-ups and leading-edge developers from more than thirty countries.

This year's conference's theme is "High Impact PHP, 2008", while Zend CEO Harold Goldberg delivered the opening keynote by discussing the ever increasing impact of PHP on businesses, communities and individuals.

Zend Technologies provides products and services for developing, deploying, and managing business-critical PHP applications. As the most popular language for building dynamic web applications, PHP is used by more than twenty million websites.

About 73 sessions will discuss the business cases and best practices for using PHP technology to create rich Internet applications, unique web services, modern web applications for IBM i5/OS and optimized web applications on the Windows platform.

At the opening of the conference, Zend announced partner initiatives and product updates that help to further advance PHP's capabilities as the premier platform for business-critical web applications, including an initiative to encourage enterprise use of PHP with IBM and for building Rich Internet Applications in collaboration with Adobe and the Ajax community.

Overall, Zend and the Dojo Foundation are collaborating to deliver an out-of-the-box solution for building Ajax-based web applications with Zend Framework and Dojo Toolkit.

The recently released Zend Framework 1.6 marks the first version of Zend Framework to offer the Dojo integration.

Zend said it will collaborate with Adobe to make it easier to develop rich Internet applications based on PHP and the free, open source Flex framework.

As part of this partnership, Adobe will help to integrate Action Message Format support into Zend Framework, which enables high bandwidth data integration between server-side PHP and client-side Flex data and logic components.

Zend also announced it is now offering Zend Core for i5/OS 2.6, the latest certified PHP stack specifically designed for IBM i5/OS and used to deploy business critical web applications on IBM i platforms.

Zend says it has already shipped a new version of Zend Studio 6.1 to IBM.

The companies also plan to enhance the experience for PHP developers using its development environments and to create special websites to educate users with Flex.

Zend also announced a new examination leading to the certification of "Zend Certified Engineer for Zend Framework."

This latest examination and certification complements the existing ZCE for PHP certification which has already certified over 3,500 ZCEs.

Zend's training and certification programs are ongoing.

Zend CEO Harold Goldberg says "overall, the high degree of interest for the conference matches the interest for PHP solutions we witness everyday in the marketplace, and the growing participation from major companies like Adobe, IBM and Microsoft fully underscore this interest."

Goldberg added "this year ZendCon will again be larger and more exciting than ever. I'm proud that we are able to offer a PHP conference so rich in topics, covering the business and technology of PHP, from participants who are new to PHP, all the way to the world's leading PHP experts."

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Source: Zend.