Magento

We had the pleasure of sitting down with Wil Sinclair at the Zend Conference earlier this week. Wil leads the Zend Framework team at Zend and in this video talks about the available v1.6 and the upcoming 1.7 release, as well as discusses notable implementations of the framework.

Roy Rubin: Alright, so who are you?

Wil Sinclair: My name is Wil Sinclair, and I manage the Zend Framework team at Zend.

Roy: OK. Tell us a little bit about Zend Framework 1.6, the latest release, right?

Wil: Yeah. So the latest release, the main feature that was probably the most awaited in 1.6 was the Dojo integration, which we announced a few months back. We also included SOAP support, so it’s a pretty comprehensive SOAP support.

We also have support for Unit Testing Controllers, that’s very important for agile style of development and test driven development. On top of that we released Zend Tool and Laboratory, which is kind of a preview version of what’s going to become our tooling infrastructure.

Roy: That’s great, and when is the next release scheduled for 1.7?

Wil: We haven’t fixed the specific date for 1.7, but I can tell you that the main features that we’re looking at there are the AMF integration that we’re working with Adobe on. We are also going to focus on performance on the ZF team. We expect to have 1.7 out sometime in Q4 at this point.

Roy: OK, that’s great. How’s the adoption been so far for the Zend Framework? Have you seen any notable implementations using the framework?

Wil: Well, sure. I mean probably the first project that comes to mind is Magento eCommerce, which is they use a lot of components; you guys use lots of components. Other projects include open source projects Tine 2.0, Digitalus CMS.

There’s a project called ... one of our community members develops it, SpotSec based on ZF.

On top of that we’ve got all kinds of sites using ZF at this point, including a lot of IGN.com properties. IGN runs sites like, ‘Rotten Tomatoes’, ‘AskMen’ some gaming sites. Right now, “Grand Theft Auto Hood” is on Zend Framework.

Something that is very exciting for us, bbc.co.uk is standardizing on Zend Framework as their front end layer. So, all properties on bbc.co.uk will be transitioned to Zend Framework within the next few years.

Roy: That’s really great! ... and the traction from the developer community has been successful from your perspective so far?

Wil: Yeah, I’ve been involved with a few open source projects. I have to say that the community in the Zend Framework project is extremely strong, extremely collaborative; it’s just you get a very good vibe. It’s very vibrant in general, and we try to involve community users.

I think that’s because we try to involve community users and developers as much as possible in the development process. So we probably have 500 contributors, round about. As far as users go it’s hard to say, but it’s fairly safe to say that upwards in the million unique downloads, so thousands-at least thousands of users, if not tens or hundreds of thousands.

Roy: OK. That’s great Wil! Thank you very much for your time this morning.

Wil: Yeah, thank you.