Zend Technologies today unveiled a major new release of its Zend Studio development environment, adding support for the newly-released PHP 5.3 platform. Zend Studio 7.0 beta adds new code assist and syntax highlighting for PHP 5.3, namespace outline features and bundles, as well as PHP executables and debugging capabilities.

In addition to PHP 5.3 support, Zend Studio IDE 7 also provides enhanced point-and-click integration with with the Zend Framework, adding ehancements such as:

• Easy Creation of Zend Framework Elements
• Customized Zend Framework Project Layout
• Updated Zend Framework Example Project
• Code generation through Zend_Tool integration

Version 7 of the IDE also includes stronger object-oriented capabilities with enhanced editing features such as:

• Mark Occurrences of Language Elements, Exit Paths and Requires
• Override Indicators for quick navigation between methods
• Type Hierarchy view for structured class hierarchy
• Open Type / Method with Camel-Case Match
• Code Assist Grouping
• In-Place Refactoring for fast element renaming
• Develop modular applications with Build and Include Path features
• Turn a block of code into a function or a variable with Extract Variable / Method
• Semantic Analysis and Auto Fix

PHP 5.3, released earlier this summer, adds a plethora of new features aimed at easing PHP development, some of which include:

• Support for namespaces
• Late static binding
• Lambda Functions and Closures
• Syntax additions: NOWDOC, ternary short cut "?:" and jump label (limited goto), __callStatic()
• Under the hood performance improvements
• Optional garbage collection for cyclic references
• Optional mysqlnd PHP native replacement for libmysql
• Improved Windows support including VC9 and experimental X64 binaries as well as portability to other supported platforms
• More consistent float rounding
• Deprecation notices are now handled via E_DEPRECATED (part of E_ALL) instead of the E_STRICT error level
• Several enhancements to enable more flexiblity in php.ini (and ini parsing in general)
• New bundled extensions: ext/phar, ext/intl, ext/fileinfo, ext/sqlite3, ext/enchant
• Over 140 bug fixes and improvements to PHP, in particular to: ext/openssl, ext/spl and ext/date

Zend also plans on releasing Zend Framework 1.9 on July 31st which will include PHP 5.3 and 5.2 support, plus new and enhanced professional level features for web application development, including:

• RESTful web services: now made easier through automated routing/detection
• Message queues: useful for offload processing (credit card transactions, media uploads), cross-platform communication, user messaging features, and more.
• LDAP: Microsoft ActiveDirectory & Novell, plus searching, filtering, and tree features
• RSS & Atom: consume these popular feed formats using a common API and higher performance cached HTTP
• DBUnit support: DBUnit's test data setup and teardown make unit testing Zend Framework applications much easier