Concentrating on rich Internet applications, Zend Technologies is backing Adobe's Action Message Format (AMF) in Zend Framework 1.7.

Version 1.7 is the latest release of the company's framework for building PHP Web applications; it is being announced at the Adobe Max 2008 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. With AMF support, PHP developers can exchange data between PHP applications on a server and Flex and Flash applications on the client.

"It makes it much easier to develop [Adobe] Flex and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) applications in PHP," said Wil Sinclair, development manager in the advanced technologies group at Zend.

Other features in Zend Framework 1.7 include performance enhancements to increase load times by 25 to 50 percent, the company said. Also featured is a native DB2 adapter to access DB2/400 data on the IBM i platform and an update to the Dojo AJAX toolkit, including a new dijit editor. Also, Zend will offer integration with the jQuery AJAX library, although Zend has chosen Dojo as its supported JavaScript library.

Version 1.7 supports Twitter, in which Twitter can be used within a Zend-based application instead of requiring the Twitter interface.

With the upcoming Zend Framework 1.8 release due in early 2009, Zend will focus on RAD (rapid application development) to build applications more easily. Tools such as a command line interface tool will be provided.

Zend Framework 1.7 is available for download here.