Zend sponsors Webinars every Wednesday covering a wide variety of topics of interest to PHP programmers. If you look over on the left sidebar [of the Zend Developer Zone site], you'll see the last five that have been published.

You can also keep up with the latest webinars by befriending the webinarzend user on Twitter. The next PHP-related webinar is coming up on July 2ns and will cover PHP security (Kevin Schroeder presenting).

One of the core features of the Zend Framework is its database access component. The DB component is designed with a "keep it simple" principle, giving access to advanced data access features, balanced with database implementation abstraction, extreme simplicity, and ease of use. Another goal of the DB component is to encourage good practices and reduce performance and security flaws. Zend's Bill Karwin will give an overview of the capabilities of the Zend DB component, and show several examples of using it in PHP 5 for tasks.

Topics covered include different types of database connections, running queries, checking the performance stats of the execution and building tables similar to ActiveRecord.

Click here to sign up for the event.

This webinar will include a short history about the PHP Development Tools framework project, some statistical information (downloads, committers, bugs) and a demonstration of the project. The demonstration includes the different perspectives (PHP and PHP Debug) and the different views under each perspective.

We will go through the creation of a PHP project, a PHP file and a debug session, where we will illustrate the debug features. During the presentation we will also see the relations to the WTP project which the PHP project is based on.

It runs about an hour and you'll need Flash to check i tout, but it's an interesting look into the software and some of the thoughts/ideas/support that currently surround it.

For those of you who missed my first online e-seminar for PHP developers, I'll be hosting another one on July 17th (next Tuesday). The content will be fairly similar, but instead of using AMFPHP I'll use WebORB for PHP, which was updated last week to 2.0.

You can register for the session here.

The session is targeted at PHP developers starting out with Flex. I'll show examples of how to connect to a PHP datasource using three different methods - REST web service, JSON and AMFPHP. I'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages to using each of them, and then show you how to extend your in browser application to the desktop using Adobe AIR.

You can find the slides here [pdf]. Also, if you want the full experience of the webcast and not just the slides, you can also sign up for the other session on July 17th.

In this webinar, Bill Karwin, Product Engineering Manager, will provide an overview of the design philosophy, the major components of the framework and its future directions. Topics will cover MVC, Search, Data Access, Web Services, Filter, Authentication, Cache and more. Tune in to learn more about the value Zend Framework can offer your web project.

You'll need Flash to check it out and it's a little over an hour long (1 hr 15 min), narrated by Bill Karwin.

Are you interested in building rich Internet applications with PHP as the backend data service? Join me this Thursday as I present at an Adobe online e-seminar. The session is scheduled for July 28th, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time.

You'll need to register for the event to attend and you'll get info on "why rich internet applications" and some examples of companies using it in their web-based applications.

In this webinar, Bill Karwin, Product Engineering Manager, will provide an overview of the design philosophy, the major components of the framework and its future directions. Topics will cover MVC, Search, Data Access, Web Services, Filter, Authentication, Cache and more.

You can sign up via Zend's site on the Webex page. The conference starts at 12pm Eastern time (GMT -04:00)/6pm Europe Daylight time (GMT +02:00) and will last about an hour.

The Zend Framework is emerging as the preferred PHP programmer's toolkit for designing Web applications with best practices. In the month's prior to the 1.0 release, Zend Framework had over 1 million downloads and multiple commercial products are already being developed with Zend Framework. In this webinar, Bill Karwin, Product Engineering Manager, will provide an overview of the design philosophy, the major components of the framework and its future directions. Topics will cover MVC, Search, Data Access, Web Services, Filter, Authentication, Cache and more.

You can sign up by going to the conference's website and entering all of your information. Details on how to connect and when will be sent to your email. The event if free of charge, so there's no reason not to come and get the latest scoop on this powerful framework's upcoming version.

The partnership between IBM and Zend is bearing fruit once again. Not satisfied with having PHP run on IBM's i5/OS V5R4, now the two companies have put their heads together and back ported Zend Core for i5/OS to V5R3.

They've also released the redbook for it that shows you how to install, configure, and work with PHP on System i using Zend Core for i5/OS and Zend Platform for i5/OS.

As far as the webcast - you can sign up for that here and find out "Why RPG programmers should care about PHP".