Zend Technologies, maker of tools for building PHP applications, is extending its Web development framework to the Amazon Web Services computing cloud.
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Cloud capabilities in Zend Framework 1.8, being announced Friday, provide developers with the ability to store and serve data redundantly and manage virtual machines.
Zend Framework 1.8 can connect to the Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) storage service as if it were a file system locally, said Matthew Weier O'Phinney, project lead and architect for Zend Framework. Users can add and remove files from S3 via PHP scripts. Also, users can manage virtual machines on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). This capability allows users to scale an application to the cloud at peak times.
"We're providing components within [the] Zend Framework library for working within Amazon Web Services," O'Phinney said.
Version 1.8 also adds RAD (rapid application development) tooling to make it easier to build PHP applications. Developers can, for example, set up a project's application directory structure and files within it. With the RAD support, developers can create their own processes and standards for specific business needs.
Rapid application prototyping is enabled with the Zend_Tool component in version 1.8.
The upgrade to the framework also integrates with the Zend Server application server, enabling caching of data via the Zend Server caching API. This saves on processing duties in Web applications and speeds up the applications.
Zend Framework 1.8 is a free, open source product. Zend offers solutions for integrating and building Web sites as well as products such as Zend Studio, for writing PHP applications.