The Zend Developer Zone has posted the announcement about the release of the latest version of the Zend's rapid application development framework - Zend Framework 1.6.

That right, fire up those down-loaders and grab your headlamp and pick-axe. There's fresh code to be had for the taking! You can download Zend Framework 1.6 here Zend Framework Download Page.

Lots of changes made their way into this new release including the Zend_Tool component, built-in pagination, a new CAPTCHA form element, the Zend_File_Transfer component and much more as they also closed over 280 tickets with bugs for this release.

There's also a note about the Zend Framework documentation and how it can now be downloaded from zend.com (free registration required) in a much more portable PDF format.