Zend Studio 2.6 Hits the Streets

Zend Technologies earlier this week unleashed version 2.6 of Zend Studio, its development environment for PHP.

Zend Technologies earlier this week unleashed version 2.6 of Zend Studio, its development environment for PHP. New features include CVS version management, XML-based project resources, and cross-file searching.

This new release is available immediately, and includes advanced productivity features for the solo developer and integrated workgroup capabilities for distributed development teams.

Key new features include:

• CVS version management integration that enables the software to transparently and directly perform all CVS operations from within the Zend Development Environment, including check-in/check-out and differencing
• XML-based project resources
• Cross-file searching and bookmark management, regular expression searching, window cloning, customizable shortcuts, conditional breakpoints, and deeper FTP integration
• Windows-specific mouse-wheel and file-system features

With these additions comes beefed up performance and cross-platform availability on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

The new capabilities have been added to Zend Studio’s modules, including its remote debugging and code completion engines.

In addition, Zend Studio v2.6 is integrated with other products in the Zend product family, including its SafeGuard Suite and Encoder products for intellectual property protection. This integration allows for direct encoding activation from within Zend Studio and Studio debugging of erroneous scripts that Encoder identifies.

Zeev Suraski, co-designer and lead developer of PHP and co-founder and CTO of Zend Technologies attributes much of the scripting language’s success, and thus Zend’s, to “its productive coding and by remote devteams working together via CVS.”

“Zend Studio now amplifies these factors, by making PHP coding faster than ever, and tying teams together conveniently,” Suraski added.

Current Zend Studio customers include Lycos, Nortel, CMG, Niagara Mohawk, Siemens, McGraw-Hill, US Bureau of Land Management, Bauch&Lomb, Sim City, Ensim, Deutsche Telecom, Apple, and more than 100 universities worldwide.

Like the previous release, Zend Studio 2.6 is priced at $195 for the standard version and $249 for Zend Studio Plus, which includes product support and upgrades. Zend is currently offering a special offer of Zend Studio Plus for $195 that guarantees all customers an immediate upgrade to 2.6 as soon as it is released.