Jelly and Custard

Zend Framework

March 7th, 2006

Zend Framework? Zend? Framework? Common questions to this posts title. First, lets set the landscape. To quote the Zend website:

Zend delivers the premier web application platform products and services for PHP applications.

Zend is the corporation most closely associated to PHP. You most likely haven't heard of Zend before, apart from the Zend Optimizer, but they are the company behind a lot of the driving force in pushing PHP into enterprise locations.

Zend have created a MVC Framework, called the Zend Framework. What this framework allows you to do is to separate your business logic, from your user interaction and display purposes. It is NOT a template system, it is NOT a CMS, it is NOT a wiki. What it does is allow you to create a framework upon which you can base your site. Ultimately, this will result in a site that has cleaner code, and is a lot easier to maintain.

Chris Shiflett has already written up a short tutorial (impressive in that the framework was only released 4 days ago!) that uses this framework to create a simple news script that has a moderation queue. Take a quick look and be amazed at what the framework can do!

A few points to note on the framework:

• It is PHP 5 only - there is no chance of running this on PHP 4
• At the moment, its only a 0.1.1 public release with 0.1.2 out later today
• There is limited DB support at the moment. It currently utilises PDO, however, that rules out mysqli and oci8 if you are already using these

That being said, the framework is looking very promising. There is support for parsing XML, creating PDF's, limited JSON/AJAX support, integrating with Amazon, Flickr or Yahoo!, as well as HTML mail handling, and input validation. The framework looks to be on the route to being the golden gun found in each developers armoury.

So why not give it a shot?

More information can be read at:

• Rob Allan's blog
• Harry Fuecks blog

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Entry Filed under: PHP