The Zend Framework
The Zend Framework, an open source project fostered by the prominent PHP product
and services provider Zend Technologies (http://www.zend.com/), was at the time of
this writing the most aggressively developed of the four frameworks. Additionally, the
Zend Framework provides a variety of task-specific components capable of carrying
out tasks that are becoming increasingly commonplace in today??™s cutting-edge Web
applications. In addition to facilitating MVC-driven development, the Zend Framework
can automate CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) database operations, perform data
caching, and filter input. But what makes the Zend Framework particularly intriguing
is the assortment of components it offers for performing nonessential but increasingly
commonplace tasks such as creating PDFs, interacting with the Amazon, Flickr,
and Yahoo! APIs, and consuming RSS feeds.
The rest of this chapter is focused on a fast-paced introduction to the Zend Framework??™s
key features, serving to acquaint you with its usage as well as to excite you about
the amazing boost in productivity it and similar frameworks have to offer.
Introducing the Zend Framework
Although all of the frameworks presented in the previous section are very powerful
and worthy of further consideration, Zend??™s particularly unique approach to framework
development led to the decision to explore it further in this chapter.
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