Zend Technologies Boasts New Zend Studio; Zend Studio 4.0 Designed for Robust, Enterprise Application Development.

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP company, and creator of products and services supporting the development, deployment and management of PHP-based applications, today announced a new version of Zend Studio. Zend Studio 4 includes a wide range of new features to assist in the development, debugging, deployment and management of PHP applications. The product is the latest in the Zend family of applications designed specifically for developers creating enterprise applications using PHP.

"The new Zend Studio 4 is the driving force in our Zend Development solution," said Pamela Roussos, vice president of marketing for Zend Technologies. "With the addition of support for all major corporate database servers, we are delivering a robust PHP solution for developers of all kinds. The unparalleled combination Zend Platform and Zend Studio 4 extends PHP development to the testing and staging environments."

New in Zend Studio 4

Zend Studio 4 is the latest in development solutions from Zend Technologies, delivering a robust development environment useful for both beginning and advanced programmers. Available in two versions; standard, and professional, the product offers a wide range of new features, including SQL database support and connectivity, over 100 reusable code snippets, more than 50 database sample applications, PHPDocs support and PHPDocumentor integration, smart Goto source, and syntax highlighting for CSS and XML.

Zend Studio also provides a professional IDE with debugger, editor and help standard in all versions, multi-language support, code templates, and PHP code analysis on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems. The product is seamlessly integrated with Zend Platform to provide a complete development and deployment solution for PHP-based applications.

The new features in Zend Studio are led by tightly integrated support for all major database servers, including IBM DB2 and Cloudscape, MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Derby and SQLite. With a suite of database tools, Zend Studio simplifies development of web database applications. The Zend Query Editor allows developers to execute queries on connected servers, connect live to several servers at once, view database schemas and manage content.

Also included in all versions of the product is the new syntax highlighting functionality for XML and CSS (cascading style sheets) in addition to the existing syntax highlighting for PHP, HTML, XHTML and JavaScript) . Designed to make editing script files more intuitive, syntax highlighting also provides a visualization of code syntax and hierarchy. The inclusion of over 50 sample database applications and over 100 code snippets in Zend Studio 4 allows developers to write code faster by providing instant access to a predefined library of PHP classes, functions, variables, constants, keywords, HTML tags, attributes and attribute tags. In addition, the product features a learning mechanism that constantly reviews new code and adds appropriate snippets to the existing library. Zend Studio 4 includes support for PHP 5 as well as an easy switching mechanism allowing users to switch between PHP 4 and PHP 5 for full application development.

Also new to version 4 are PHPDocs support and PHPDocumentor, together delivering an integrated mechanism from within Zend Studio to generate professional documentation directly from the PHP project source code.

Combined with the recent introduction of Zend Platform, Zend Technologies has delivered a comprehensive and powerful development and deployment environment for PHP. Zend Studio 4 Professional Edition is seamlessly integrated, providing quick identification of run-time problems and giving the developer instant access to source code reducing the time to fix and test. This solid integration between the products gives PHP developers all the necessary tools required to develop and test business-critical applications for the corporate enterprise.

"Zend Studio 4 is hands down the best IDE available for PHP," said Jeremy Johnstone, formerly the developer of the new Hotscripts.com site and now with WebGroup Media, LLC. "The new features in this release will greatly improve the efficiency of our team. Moreover, Zend is very responsive to customer feedback even at the highest levels. I highly recommend you check out Zend Studio today, you won't regret it!"

The complete line of Zend offerings deliver a comprehensive solution, allowing developers to create, deploy and manage their PHP applications across the enterprise.

Pricing and Availability

Zend Studio 4 will be available in February 2005 in two versions; Standard for $99, Professional for $299 ($199 renewal). Both prices include expert technical support and one year of free updates and upgrades. Supported platforms include Linux, SPARC Solaris, FreeBSD 4.x/5.x and Mac OS X.

About Zend Technologies, Inc.

Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications. Zend and its founders are the architects of PHP, which is used by more than fifteen million Web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic web applications. Deployed at more than 8,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Zend, headquartered in Cupertino, California, is privately held and venture funded with investments from Azure, Index, Platinum, and Walden Israel. For more information, please visit www.zend.com, or call 1-408-253-8800.

Zend, Zend Technologies, Zend Store, Zend SOS, Zend.com and/or the logos and icons associated with each of these names are trademarks of Zend Technologies, Inc. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.