Zend Technologies has delivered on the collaboration agreement it has signed with Microsoft on October 31, 2006, and has made available for download a public beta for Zend Core 2.0. With Zend Core 2.0, Zend Technologies is enhancing the experience of running the PHP scripting language on Windows.

"Zend Core for Windows Technology Preview aims to deliver improved performance and stability as well as ease of deployment and use on Windows Internet Information Server using PHP 5.2. This Technology preview demonstrates the Zend Core for Windows capabilities," revealed Zend.

Zend Core for Windows Technology Preview is designed to run on Windows 2003 Server r2 and Windows XP Professional and supports SQL Server, MySQL, IBM DB2, Oracle Database and the Apache 1.3.x, 2.0.x and Microsoft IIS 5, 6 web servers. In this stage of development, Zend Core for Windows Technology Preview does not support IIS 7 (Windows Vista and Windows Server "Longhorn").

"Zend has created an improved build of the PHP 5.2 distribution that is optimized for the Windows platform, and includes many performance fixes that significantly improve the performance of the PHP engine on Windows. Zend Core is a tested and enhanced version of the open source PHP. It is packaged to make the software installation easier and faster with instant PHP setup. Zend works closely with the leading software vendors to ensure the best integration between their technology and PHP," added Zend.

By the time that Microsoft will launch Longhorn, Zend Core will offer support, because one of the engagements taken by Zend was to ensure that the PHP runtime environment would integrate seamlessly with IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0