Zend Technologies, the PHP commercializer, has put out a major new release of Zend Studio, its IDE for the PHP language.

Designed to improve productivity for professional-grade web application development, Studio 7.0 supports the newly released PHP 5.3 language as well as tight integration with Zend Server and Zend Framework.

Meanwhile, Zend Framework has been updated for the fifth time in two years.

Rev 1.9 features the requisite PHP 5.3 support, which means developers can use the latest PHP language features in their Zend Framework-based apps, plus new community-built professional-level features for web application development.

The company says RESTful Web Services are now easier to build because of automated routing/detection. And there’s message queuing for asynchronous processes along with LDAP, RSS/Atom and DBUnit test support.

Zend Studio is built on the Zend-led Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) 2.1 open source software, currently the most popular of the Eclipse projects, Zend says.

The beta version of Studio was downloaded 20,000 times since it was released last month. Key new features include point and click Zend Framework coding and enhanced integration with Zend Server.