The release, planned for May 2007, will simplify building PHP applications Zend Technologies plans to release its Zend Framework 1.0 product by late May, a company official said at the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., on Wednesday.The framework is intended to make it easier to build PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) applications. It features capabilities saving developers from having to re-create the same pieces over and over again. The 1.0 version of the framework will be production-ready, said Andi Gutmans, Zend co-CTO. The beta version of the product has had a lot of use, he said.“We actually have some big customers who are using this in production,” Gutmans said. “The goal of the Zend Framework was to provide a very, very easy-to-use, well-established and supported framework,” Gutmans said. But he did note that there are more than 40 PHP frameworks available, including Symfony, Prado, and CakePHP.PDF support will be in Zend Framework 1.0; the company in a future release wants to include support for the OpenOffice and Microsoft Office file formats.In other PHP developments, Gutmans said a planned upgrade to the PHP platform, PHP 6, is likely due this year in beta form. It will feature Unicode support. Gutmans also said he expects PHP and Zend products to accommodate identity technologies such as OpenID.Virtualization is another area where Gutmans sees uptake for PHP users. “It’s something you’re going to see more and more PHP deployments use,” said Gutmans. Virtualization presents advantages in manageability, he said.Increasingly, PHP will be used in a hybrid format with Java and possibly even with the Microsoft .Net application development platform, Gutmans said. Java, he said, loses out to PHP for Web development because Java takes too long to develop with it, he said. Software Development