Well, the official announcement has been made and the Zend Developer Zone has the scoop on the latest release of the Zend Framework - Preview Release 0.6.0.

This represents a watershed for Zend Framework: we have passed the halfway point. We decided to advance the version number more than the customary "one-tenth" increment.

We are at a phase in which we are focused on finishing the components of the product. As we are approaching a state of feature-completeness, a Beta Release, and then the General Release of version 1.0, we have created a more precise roadmap for the scope and schedule of upcoming preview releases of Zend Framework.

Updates in this edition include:

• Lucene-compatible search engine query language
• Improved Session-handling design
• Improved XmlRpc client and server
• Emerging components for I18N, Getopt, Mail folders, and others.
• Solutions for 126 bugs and feature enhancements, recorded in our issue tracker.

You can read up about all this and more on the Zend Framework Wiki home page.

You can also check out some other comments from Andi Gutmans (of Zend) over on his blog.