Hi everybody,
I posted the binaries for Zend Framework 0.8.0 preview release. So the code-freeze is now lifted. We can start the final development iteration before we reach Zend Framework Beta Release! Thanks to all the developers, testers, and documentation translators who have worked so hard on the 0.8.0 release. It's really amazing and exciting to see the project move forward in many areas. In this latest release especially, it was hard to write the release notes because so many things happened. Some of the changes happened without as much fanfare as I think they deserve. So I thought I'd expand a little bit on the announcement I just sent to fw-announce and devzone. - Thomas and Gavin made some significant improvements in the I18N components, Zend_Locale and Zend_Date. These components have really matured a lot. - The trio of Zend_Auth, Zend_Session, and Zend_Acl have all improved, and they all are now in the core library. - Zend_Filter and Zend_Validate provide object-oriented classes to replace the mostly-static implementation of Zend_Filter we had previously. - Nico, Matthew, and Simon did a lot of work on the Zend_Mail and Zend_Mime classes, and now the component reads email as well as sends email (I'm not sure what this implies for Zend Framework in relation to Zawinski's Law of Software Development <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawinski's_law_of_software_envelopment> , but it's pretty cool! ;-). - The MVC support for modular directories has become both more capable and yet simpler. Thanks Matthew! - Alexander has made some enhancements to Zend_Search_Lucene which improved the performance dramatically. - Zend_Db had 37 issues resolved, and has greatly expanded unit test coverage, positioning it for a lot of enhancement in the next iteration. - Zend_Log has a new object-oriented design shaping up in the incubator. Don't miss this one! - Quite a few components made the move from incubator to core, which means they have complete documentation and unit tests: Zend_Rest_Client & Server, Zend_Console_Getopt, Zend_Service_Akismet, as well as Zend_Auth, Zend_Filter, and Zend_Validate mentioned above. To be successful, a software project must have its "gems" -- features that are so compelling and useful at solving real problems that people are attracted to use the software. I am a believer in Zend Framework because it is full of gems! Regards, Bill Karwin
