The least release of the Zend Framework (Version 1.7) provides a number of new features, bug fixes and performance enhancements.
It seems that Zend is concentrating on Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) in this release as they are now providing support for Adobe's Action Message Format (AMF) which allows developers to easily share data between PHP applications and Flash (including Flex and AIR). While I haven't had the opportuity to test this out personally, I'm sure it will be a huge time saver for our developers.
Version 1.7 will also offer integration with jQuery's AJAX library. This is great for our team as we already include the jQuery library on all of our projects. In addition to outstanding AJAX support, jQuery's lightweight code base is great for HTML document traversing, event handling and animating.
Zend has also provided us with a little goodie that will make it possible for developers to add Twitter to their site without requiring the Twitter interface. Twitter is making a big impact on the Web so I'm glad that this service is available to developers.
Finally, I'd like to mention that the Zend has made done some fine tuning to improve performance. You can expect a 25% to 50% improvement in load times by upgrading your Zend library. This could be the best enhancement of all.
Thanks to the entire Zend community for making this new release available!
