The Zend Developer Zone has taken a look at the first release of the Zend_Locale_UTF8 component for the Zend Framework and some comments from it's lead developer, Andre Hoffmann.
Andre Hoffmann posted a blog entry today to talk about his work on Zend_Locale_UTF8: "I just released the first version of Zend_Locale_UTF8.It doesn't come with all functions nor with the best performance, but it shows how the current state of development is."
He also lists some of the things still missing from the component, including: unit tests, substr, strstr, PHP6 support, and mbstring support.