Zend Technologies has announced the general availability of Zend Studio 8.0, its IDE for PHP developers. The new release centers on helping PHP developers to streamline development and testing processes through integration with VMware Workstation.

Along with a new pricing model, Zend Studio 8.0 will come with expanded support for the development of rich Internet applications that use JavaScript front-end and PHP back-end.

The company claims that Zend Studio 8.0 enables PHP teams to enhance their development and testing processes by running and debugging their applications in a virtual, production-like environment. Through a VMWare Workstation environment, developers set their development server to a local virtual machine that mirrors the production environment, and deploy their code directly onto that virtual server from the Zend Studio interface. In theory, this process eliminates potential errors and speeds up the testing and debugging cycles.

"VMware is committed to increasing the productivity of software development organizations and evolving application and data delivery environments into a user-centric model," said Parag Patel, VP of global strategic alliances at VMware. "Our partnership with Zend brings the full benefits of virtualization to PHP developers, enabling them to accelerate software development times and reduce hardware costs."

Zend Studio 8.0 also enables faster coding of PHP and JavaScript applications through built-in Content Assist support for a large set of JavaScript-based libraries including jQuery, Dojo, Ext JS and Prototype.

Additionally, a new set of integrated Ajax tools simplifies debugging of PHP and JavaScript applications by supporting debugging of the JavaScript front-end and the PHP back-end in one combined session.