There are two new posts on the Professional PHP blog today concerning the imminent announcement of the Zend PHP framework, as mentioned in this previous post.

The Utah PHP user's group may have let the cat out of the bag a day early for an announcement at tomorrow's Zend / PHP Conference. I'm curious about the framework name. When I hear framework, I think API. Are they releasing a something intended to compete on the same level with Rails or .Net?

Or is this strictly an IDE announcement?

API, IDE or both? Got my attention.

In Part 1, he gives two quotes from two sources: Yahoo and ZDNet suggests that it's nothing more than a standard component model for PHP. In Part 2, however, he mentions this post on Computerworld suggest that maybe the new framework will play well with Java, picking up the slack from where PHP just can't go yet.

Of course, it could just be an add-in API for Zend Studio...

UPDATE: you can read more from the SitePoint PHP blog about this subject here as well. My personal favorite is this quote:

Don’t get me wrong, I think object oriented programming and proven design patterns like MVC are great, and there are certainly lessons that PHP can take from these to make large-scale development more practical. But it’s vitally important that PHP not blindly follow the platforms that came before it. There’s a reason PHP today is far more appropriate than Java for a great many projects, and to risk losing that uniqueness is to risk the future of PHP itself.