The Zend Developer Zone points to a new podcast done from the Dr. Dobbs Journal folks with Jon Erickson talking to Andi Gutmans of Zend about a wide range of PHP topics:

In this 5 minute podcast, Jon and Andi talk about a wide variety of topics. They touch on PHP Scalability, Web Services, Zend Framework and how Zend implemented the Lucene search engine in PHP.

Cal also mentions their discussion of the BIRT reporting functionality that is newly integrated with the Zend Platform product.

You can grab the full podcast here.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted this release announcement for the latest version of Zend's application server - Zend Platform 3.0:

Zend Technologies, the PHP company, today announced the general availability of Zend Platform 3.0. Zend Platform 3.0 is the only PHP application server created specifically to support the management, performance, integration and scalability requirements of organizations that use PHP to run business-critical web applications. Zend Platform improves the end user experience with these web applications by enabling better application responsiveness, reduced application downtime, and richer functionality.

Updates from the previous version include:

• Support for PHP 5.2
• Zend Optimizer 3.2.3 and Zend Debugger 5.2.4 are included
• New servers: Performance Mangement Server, Integration Servers & Enterprise Server
• PHP Configuration Control enhancements
• Actuate BIRT Reporting integration
• and more [txt]

You can check out the features and everything about the Zend Platform on it's official page on Zend's website.