Apart from the new exciting features we have in symfony 1.1, this version also represents a year of hard work to refactor the internals. Let's dig into symfony internals a bit!

They talk about the new platform that everything is built of off now including the framework itself (complete with diagrams mapping out the different parts of the MVC whole).

Like most organizations the BBC has its own technical ecosystem, the BBC's is pretty much restricted to Perl and static files. The good news is that they are planning to build a new infrastructure for bbc.co.uk and roll out a new Identity platform on it. This was announced on May during the XTech 2008 presentation that took place in Dublin, where BBC's plans to reinvigorate its technical platform were revealed.

The BBC wanted to upgrade their aging platform to something a bit newer and more flexible and wanted to be able to use things like the Zend Framework for the presentation layer and a MySQL backend to power the site.

Kargo derives significant competitive advantage as their application designers & producers make use of Zend Framework to build their next generation mobile application platform on. [...] Zend Technologies will present an introduction to the modular "use at will" PHP 5 components in Zend Framework and Kargo will outline the high-performance messaging server and mobile internet platform they've built.

You can find out more about the meetup from its page on Upcoming and check out this page for more details and a map to the location (New York, NY).

The NetBeans 6.1 release is mostly a release of the candidate announced a few weeks ago - definitely a lot of changes in the overall release, with a heavy focus on web services and re-integration of some of the JSF/JPA tooling. However, the PHP platform - a 16MB or so download that provides a PHP-targeted IDE based on Java - is .. interesting.

Comments on the post talk a lot about the other language support for the IDE with only a few mentioning the PHP support (though the ones that do show promising results).

Rasmus Lerdorf has an example of the potential output for a search returning a restaurant's name, links to its menu/wine list, reviews and a link to make a reservation.

There's lots of fun things to do with this tool - check out the developer page for more information and grab the developer tool to jump in and get started building your own custom result.

Magento is an ecommerce platform on PHP which is quite feature rich. This platform is based on the Zend Platform. You can take a look at a Magento store and the admin demo over at their demo section.

He mentions some of the features it has including analytics, catalog management, order management, payment integration with Paypal/Google Checkout/Authorize.net and some SEO optimizations.

You can find out more over on the project's website and download your own copy or peruse the forums to get to know the community around this popular app.

The last few days I've started working with Zend Studio for Eclipse. At first view I didn't miss anything which I've used in Zend Studio 5.5 and the IDE looks very good. [...] Overall I think Zend Studio for Eclipse is a great tool to develop PHP applications. With a large amount of plugins, Eclipse provides a platform which gives the possibilty to develop a whole application within one tool, that's a great benefit.

Most of the issues that she came across from the transition were minor things - keystrokes for shortcuts changed, slowness with the breakpoints - nothing that would stop her from dropping it and going back to the regular Zend Studio 5.5.

Just before the July 4th holiday, Jim Dillard, the IBM alliance manager at Zend, and Ron Newman, who is chairman of COMMON's Advocacy Team and president of technology consulting firm Newmark Technologies, sent out a joint appeal via email for people to join the Zend Advisory Group.

The idea behind the group is to get together a bunch of COMMON members and have them provide direct input to Zend so the unique capabilities of the System i platform can be addressed more fully by Zend's products and to help Zend better understand how to interface with and deliver products to midrange customers.

Wondering if you (or your company) are in the group they're looking for? Here's some of the requirements:

• Are you currently a programmer using the System i?
• Have you installed Zend Core for i5/OS?
• Do you have a PHP application running now?
• Do understand the process of creating a call to the DB2 database?
• Can you invoke RPG commands via the PHP toolkit?

If this is you and you'd like ot get in on the group, send an email along to Ron Newman for more information.