Zend Technologies has announced the availability of version 3.6 of Zend Platform. The new version of the PHP Web application server delivers new and enhanced functionality in three major areas: PHP intelligence, performance management, and cluster management.
PHP Intelligence has to do with the monitoring of HTTP, Apache, and Java events, as well as offering better diagnostics to improve the overall reliability and stability of an infrastructure based on PHP. Downtime is reduced by recording full context for reported problems so that “root cause” diagnostics and resolution can be made within a short time. The other two aspects are pretty much self-explanatory.

Excerpt from eWeek:

Performance has remained an issue for dynamic languages such as PHP and Ruby. Zend Platform 3.6 improves the performance of PHP applications by caching pre-optimized PHP byte code, Zend officials said. The product features support for file- or URL-based page caching, client-side caching and in-memory or disk-based data caching.

Zend also introduced Zend Studio for Eclipse, an IDE for PHP developers. It has seen more than 250,000 downloads since its launch in September 2007.