Zend made several announcements in the opening keynote of this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo including collaborations with Adobe, IBM and the Dojo project to further PHP's place in the online development community.

These announcements pertained to partnerships with these other companies on projects like bringing out-of-the-box Ajax functionality to the Zend Framework with Dojo and updates to the Zend Core and Zend Studio software. Also announced was the release of a new certification specifically for the Zend Framework - "Zend Certified Engineer for Zend Framework".

One of the major announcements, though, was Zend's efforts with Adobe to help make the connection between their powerful Flex environment and what PHP has to offer. The key to the integration lies in the AMFPHP (Action Message Format) tool that acts as a layer letting Flex and PHP talk. Zend and Adobe will also be, from this point on, creating links between the Zend Studio software and the Adobe Flex Builder software to help developers to help make the integration that much simpler.

You can find out more about their efforts on the Zend Framework website and the Adobe Flex pages on Adobe's developer website.