Zend Framework 2.0.0beta5 Released!

The Zend Framework community is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Zend Framework 2.0.0beta5. Packages and installation instructions are available at: http://packages.zendframework.com/

This is the fifth and last in a series of planned beta releases. The beta release cycle has followed the "gmail" style of betas, whereby new features have been added in each new release, and backwards compatibility (BC) has not been guaranteed. The desire has been for developers to adopt and work with new components as they are shipped, and provide feedback so we can polish the distribution.

Our plan at this time is to do some cleanup of the repository, fix some outstanding issues and features, migrate documentation to a new repository and format, and then begin the release candidate process. At this time, we anticipate few if any BC breaks between now and the first release candidate (RC). Applications built today on beta5 will operate in the way we expect them to for the stable release.

Beta5 had a rigorous and busy schedule. We tackled a number of consistency issues, and solidified the security the framework offers via several fixes and the new Escaper component. We processed over 400 pull requests again, in a shorter timeframe than we had for beta4; the community really pulled together to get this release out the door.

There are three primary new features for the release:

• Zend\Escaper, which provides an OWASP-compliant solution for context-specific escaping mechanisms targetting HTML, HTML attributes, URLs, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Zend\I18n, which leverages PHP's ext/intl extension to provide localization, and also provides a new translation component.
• Zend\Form now has new annotation support, allowing you to define annotations in your domain entities that can then be used to build a form and its related input filter and hydrator. Annotation support now has a dependency on Doctrine\Common's annotation library, for our default annotation syntax parser.