The Zend Developer Zone has has announced the official release of the latest version of their framework - Zend Frameowrk 1.0.0 RC1.

This is the home stretch toward 1.0! Everyone has worked very hard for many months, and we are very close to finishing what we set out to do with Zend Framework 1.0. This Release Candidate is intended to show the complete set of features Zend Framework 1.0 has.

Following the final 1.0 release, Zend Framework will continue to grow and improve, but there will be a great emphasis on maintaining backward-compatibility. That has been the mission of Zend Framework from the beginning, to provide a professional web framework with quality and stability.

Included in the release announcement are spotlights on things like improvements to Zend_Controller, Zend_Gdata, Zend_Db, Zend_Filter_Input and Zend_Service_StrikeIron.

You can download this latest release at http://framework.zend.com or check out the Changelog for more info in the changes from 0.9.3.