The Zend Framework group has released the long awaited first stable release of the framework - Zend Framework 1.0.0. Here's some of the release announcement:

Many thanks to the scores of PHP developers who have worked for many months to make this product milestone possible. Zend Framework has followed a mission to provide classes that are extremely simple, yet powerful and extensible. Zend Framework is now the best class library available for PHP 5 web application development.

The Zend Framework project has developed solutions to solve frequent needs of web application developers

You can download this latest version from the Framewrok's website and check out the Changelog for the full list of updates.

Here's a few links to other's talking about the release:

• the announcement on the Zend Developer Zone
• Patrick Reilly
• Andi Gutmans (of Zend)
• Jason Gilmore on the Inside Open Source blog
• the post from php|architect
• a post from Pádraic Brady
• a blog entry from Rob Allen
• the official press release from Zend
• a post from Jonathan Snook
• this new post on the Symfony framework's blog
• an article from InternetNews.com
• a post on Ilimitado.de about the release