A framework development team at Zend Technologies is on a last-minute push to get a PHP framework ready for launch July 2, offering a platform-assist to the estimated 4.5 million developers using PHP.

Zend Framework is designed to supply the Web site plumbing beneath applications built in the popular scripting language. The framework will implement best practices in connecting the application to databases and networks, leaving developers free to concentrate on user interactions and the business logic behind them, said Andi Gutmans, Zend co-founder and CTO.

IBM and Google developers have contributed to the project, and IBM's QEDWiki, an enterprise Wiki program, was built using the framework. Zend Framework will include Google Data APIs, which will help developers' product applications that connect directly to Google GData libraries for invoking Google application services, whether Mail, Calendar, or Maps.

The framework also will connect to Microsoft's resources by implementing a set of .Net APIs.

PHP came into its own as a Web language as Zeev Suraski and Gutmans produced a 3.0 version of the Personal Home Page language in 1997 and adapted it for business use. PHP became an object-oriented language in its 5.0 version and its ease of use made it a favorite for getting Web site resources to work together.

Mark DeVisser, Zend chief marketing officer, said the framework will contain code samples and will enforce best practices for some uses of PHP code. The framework has been available in its preliminary stages since May 2006 and has experienced more than 1 million downloads by 200,000 individuals or unique visitors to the Zend site.

"We match Spring in developer downloads," claimed DeVisser. Spring is a Java best-practices framework produced by Interface21 and has been a noted open source success story. Like Spring, the Zend Framework implements a user interface in the structured model-view-controller method used by C++ and Java developers. The approach keeps the server-side parts of the user interface separate from the user presentation side, allowing frequent changes to a user interface presentation without disrupting the underlying logic of a Web application.

The software will be issued under the BSD open source license that eliminates the GPL give-back provision for developers who build commercial products with the framework.