We’ve been really busy this last month working on Phalcon 0.4.0, and for our pleasure is finally here! This release is giving much more satisfaction than ever before knowing that have been built with many suggestions and feedback from developers around all the globe.

Also, this final version is adding some highly requested features to Phalcon:

Our next release, 0.4.0, is almost ready to rock, but we need your help to get the finish line in the best shape possible. Although previous alpha only included improvements in code structure and overall speed, this version (0.4.0 beta) is introducing several new features, improvements and bug fixes.

Below is a comprehensive list of changes:

A couple of weeks a friend from Mexico, suggested us to create an alternative interface to Phalcon Developer Tools. It is true, some people have a hate relationship with the commend console ;).

Today we are releasing the Phalcon Developer Tools in a web based flavor, our WebTools. WebTools offer the same functionality as the Developer Tools, but now have a beautiful web interface, allowing you to be more productive without extra complications or effort learning commands.

We’re happy to announce that after weeks of refactoring and polishing, 0.4.x are now ready to be tested. Although, it’s an alpha release, it has many improvements, specially focused on a more maintainable code base and get running applications even faster.

If you spend a lot of time making software updates, you’re probably familiar with the frustration of manually update every change you made on your development database to the production stage. :S

So, we are happy to announce database migrations available on Developer Tools! That has been one of the most highly requested features in Phalcon (we know… most frameworks also provide it), anyway, it always feels great when we deliver something we know users have an acute need of.

Some of you have asked us: Why the framework was called Phalcon?, and we’re happy to respond.

We look ourselves as a strange kind of geek personality that make a point to be environmentally friendly (not convinced yet being hipster), so we love nature as you can tell our logo obviously represents a falcon!

Since rolling out version 0.3.4 a few days ago, we’ve been hard at work on the next installment of Phalcon. In addition to a few bug fixes and minor tweaks, this release focuses on the ORM component and its partner Phalcon\Db.

It may not sound all that exciting at first, but trust us on this one. Thanks to this release will come one of the most highly requested features in Phalcon.

The following changes can be expected in this version:

We’re part of the “speed up the web”, therefore, we want to have a rapid release schedule releasing continuous improvements and bug fixes to Phalcon.

The C language has not been designed for rapid development; however, we are putting a lot of enthusiasm to get a better and faster framework.

INVO is a sample application completely written with Phalcon. It will give you a closer insight into application development with this framework. Although, it’s quite functional, have some flaws we expect to complement at the future (at this time does not produce invoices, for example).