Zend framework- The future of PHP, is a simple straight forward open source software framework for PHP 5 with a rigorously tested agile code-base. It eliminates the tedious details of coding and lets us focus on the big picture. Its strength lies in its highly-modular MVC design, making the code more reusable and easier to maintain. It is essentially a use-at-will framework. There is no strict pattern that all Zend Framework users must follow, although ZF does provide components for the MVC, Table Data Gateway, and Row Data Gateway design patterns. It promotes web development best practices in the PHP community.

Loosely coupled, yet highly cohesive pieces

Tooling and Rapid Application Development (RAD)

– Generate the project structure, MVC artifacts, and more..

Access Control Lists

– Light weight and flexible access control lists and privileges management. Basic implementations of roles and resources, rule inheritance support for the resources, conditionally rules via assertion interface for low level access privileges.

Authentication

– Concrete authentication APIs for common use cases. It provides adapter interface for custom authentication mechanisms. It also abstracts the identity storage.

Caching

– Flexible approach for caching with tagging, manipulating, iterating etc. It provides multiple storage back-ends (File, Sqlite, Memcached) and multiple front-ends (helpers for caching function call or a whole page). We may cache a configuration object to eliminate time consuming parsing of config file during each request.

Controllers and Views

– Provides infrastructure for MVC website. It provides simple and extensible MVC pattern with PHP based template engine by default. It also supports application modules having a configuration-less architecture.

Database access layer

– Lightweight database access layer, providing an interface to PDO and other database extensions in PHP. It includes adapters for each database driver, a query profiler, and an API to construct most SELECT statements. It provides query builder and robust SQL support including parameters and quoting.

Other eye-catching components

– Components to work with live syndicated feeds, tools necessary for input filtering and validation, the Google Data API’s provide read/write access to services hosted at google.com, (for example, Spreadsheets, Calendar, Blogger, and CodeSearch), load files, classes, and resources dynamically in your PHP application, object oriented interface for consuming and providing XML-based REST web services, a port of Apache Search Lucene (Java search engine) written entirely in PHP 5, wrappers for service APIs from major providers (Akismet, Amazon, Audioscrobbler, Delicious, Flickr, Simpy, StrikeIron and Yahoo!), simple cloud API, Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n).

Advantages

High-quality, extensible and well-tested object-oriented PHP 5 class library.

Attention to best practices like design patterns, unit testing, & loose coupling.

Logging, caching, debugging, filtering.

Flexible architecture.

No configuration files necessary to get going.

Vast community support.

Links to be bookmarked :

http://framework.zend.com (zend framework)

About the Author :

Kiran works for Bobcares, as Sr. Software Engineer since April 2010. He is an expert in PHP based web development. He bags an experience of 3.8 years in the industry. His hobbies include blogging, listening to music and traveling. He is passionate about Zend framework, OO concepts and design, jQuery…