In a recent press release from Zend, they talk about some of the latest updates to the Zend Framework 2 project (the release of Beta 3) and what it offers developers:

This new revision of the framework is geared towards greater developer productivity and application performance, providing rich support for the leading cloud services and providers, and a streamlined and simple workflow for developing next-generation mobile applications and APIs.

[...] Zend Framework 2 highlights [include]: Simpler and easier to use components, better modularity and code reuse, significantly improved performance, an entirely new Cloud Infrastructure component and full PHP 5.3 support right now.

The project roadmap has the Beta 4 release happening in the second quarter of 2012 with a general availability release happening the following quarter (Q3). Guides are in the works to help ease the transition from the 1.x releases of Zend Framework up to 2.x.

Chris Shiflett has posted this new item on his blog today with his look back at his year in 2005 - both personal and community related.

In the tradition of my 2003 and 2004 highlights, I'm posting my personal highlights of 2005. As in years past, this is mainly for my own benefit. I hope everyone has a wonderful 2006.

Some of the more memorable things on his list include:

• the launch of the PHP Security Consortium
• the launch of his consulting company, BrainBulb
• made numerous speeches
• completed his second book, PHPDecurity.org, a companion to it

Overall, a great year...he also includes some of the things that he'd like to do in the next year as well (speak at fewer conferences, contribute more to open source, etc).