Matthew Weier O’Phinney, the lead developer of the Zend Framework project, has released the second maintenance release of the 1.10 series. This is the release that follows naturally the Bug Hunt Days of the last week, when about 50 bugs were closed.

More importantly, after three months of public discussion between contributors on the Zend Framework 2.0 roadmap , he created a “development-2.0” branch in the official Subversion repository, by mirroring the current trunk. While the 1.x branch will not be discontinued and critical bugs or security issues will be addressed in the 1.10 or hypothetical 1.11 line of development, the 2.x branch will be the first to take advantage of PHP 5.3 features, such as namespaces. Many PHP frameworks have decided to jump on the 5.3 bandwagon, in the hope of stimulating its adoption by hosting vendors and Linux distributions.

The 2.x branch will also see many simplifications of the development process: require_once() statements are currently being stripped in favor of autoloading, and the test suite is being updated to leverage recently introduced PHPUnit features (bootstrap files and configuration of test suites via annotations). The 1.x code will be also fully converted to namespaced classes.

Finally, there is already a discussion on the 2.x branch going on: whether the newborn codebase should be managed via a Git or Subversion repository; if you intend to contribute to Zend Framework you may want to participate and express your opinion. The main advantages of continuing to use Subversion is the ease of importing external libraries (Dojo) and its strict access control that allows checking for CLAs by contributors. Git is a powerful infrastructure for distributed development instead, which would end the infinite series of patches uploaded to the bug tracker and stimulate integration of unstable code in private repositories.