First detailed in , with a having begun last month, Zend Core 2.0 offers enhanced Windows performance. Applications will run two to three times faster on Windows with this version of Zend Core, Mark de Visser, Zend chief marketing officer, said.

Zend calls itself "the PHP company" and has built its business around the scripting language. PHP is being used in virtually all modern Web sites, de Visser said. "The reason is because for all these types of highly interactive Web sites, there is nothing like PHP," in terms of productivity and the ability to find PHP developers, he said.

Version 2.0 of Zend Core is intended to provide a unified front for Windows by enabling developers to both build and then deploy their PHP applications on Windows platforms. Oftentimes, developers have written the applications on Windows but then ran them on Linux. Now, Zend's PHP will run equally well on either Windows or Linux, said de Visser.

"We worked with Microsoft to address issues of performance, stability, interaction with Web servers, things like that," de Visser said.

Applications can run on Windows 2000 servers now and on the upcoming "Longhorn" version of Windows when that is ready, said de Visser. In addition to Windows and Linux, Mac OS X deployments also are supported with Zend Core 2.0.