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Zend Framework is an open source, object-oriented web application framework implemented in PHP 5 and licensed under the New BSD License. Zend Framework- often referred to as ZF- is developed with the goal of simplifying web development while bringing best practices to the PHP developer community.
ZF's use-at-will architecture allows developers to reuse components when and where they make sense in their applications without requiring other ZF components beyond minimal dependencies. There is therefore no single development paradigm or pattern that all Zend Framework users must follow, although ZF does provide components for the MVC and Table Gateway design patterns which are used in most ZF applications. Zend Framework provides individual components for many other common requirements in web application development, including authentication and authorization via access control lists (ACL), application configuration, data caching, filtering/validation of user-provided data for security and data integrity, internationalization, interfaces to AJAX functionality, email composition/delivery, Lucene-format search indexing and querying, and all Google Data APIs along with many other popular web services. Because of their loosely coupled design, ZF components are often used alongside components from other PHP web application frameworks.
History and Philosophy
Zend Framework was conceived in early 2005 while many new frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails and the Spring Framework, were gaining popularity in the web development community. At the same time, no widely used framework had been made available to the PHP community to fulfill similar web development needs. The designers of Zend Framework sought to combine the ease-of-use and rapid application development (RAD) features of these new frameworks with the simplicity, openness, and real-world practicality that is highly valued in the PHP community. Typically, specific development usage scenarios are implemented using more generalized software components through automatic configuration and/or code generation. In previous releases, the Zend Framework community has opted to complete development and testing of these underlying components before starting work on simplifying development tasks such as database migrations, generating scaffolding, and project creation and configuration. This practice has been the subject of some criticism since some functionality considered by many as necessary for a general release for modern web application frameworks is slated for future Zend Framework releases. Many ZF users, however, have found such generalized software components more reusable and extensible in implementing their applications. Zend Framework also seeks to promote web development best practices in the PHP community; conventions are not as commonly used in ZF as in many other frameworks, rather suggestions are put forth by setting reasonable defaults that can be overridden for each ZF application’s specific requirements.
Licensing
Zend Framework is licensed under the Open Source Initiative(OSI)-approved New BSD License, and all code contributors must sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) based on the Apache Software Foundation’s CLA. The licensing and contribution policies were established to circumvent any intellectual property issues for commercial ZF users.
Sponsor and Partners
Zend Technologies, co-founded by PHP core contributors Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, is the corporate sponsor of Zend Framework. Technology partners include IBM, Google, Microsoft, and StrikeIron.
Requirements
Zend Framework requires PHP 5.1.4 or later, although the ZF Programmer's Reference Guide strongly recommends PHP 5.2.3 or later for security and performance improvements included in these versions of PHP. PHPUnit 3.0 or later is required to run the unit tests shipped with Zend Framework. Many components also require PHP extensions; a full list of components and their dependencies can be found in the Programmer's Reference Guide.
Releases
Zend Framework releases are versioned with three numbers in the format x.y.z, where a changes in x, y, or z correspond to major, minor, and mini releases, respectively. The first General Availability release of ZF was released on 6/30/2007 as Zend Framework 1.0. The latest release is 1.0.3, which was made available for download on 11/30/2007. The next scheduled release is Zend Framework 1.5 slated for Q1 2008.
Features
- All components are fully object-oriented PHP 5 and are E_STRICT compliant
- Use-at-will architecture with loosely coupled components and minimal interdependencies
- Extensible MVC implementation supporting layouts and PHP-based templates by default
- Flexible Table Gateway implementation for accessing data from a relational database in an object-oriented environment
- Support for multiple database systems and vendors, including MySQL, Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and Informix Dynamic Server
- Authentication and ACL-based authorization using a variety of backend systems
- Data filtering and validation for enhanced application security
- Session management
- Configuration component to promote consistent configuration management throughout the Zend Framework and ZF applications
- Email composition and delivery
- Indexing and search that supports the Lucene index file format
- Internationalization and localization
- Identity 2.0 technologies such as Microsoft InfoCard and OpenID
- Multiple formats for web services, including XML-RPC, REST, and Google GData.
- Flexible caching sub-system with support for many types of backends, such as Random Access Memory memory or a file system.
- Simple logging component inspired by log4j
- Native-PHP component for reading, updating, and creating Portable Document Format PDF documents
- Serialization of PHP data structures to and from JSON to facilitate AJAX development
- API for consuming RSS and Atom feeds
- Client libraries for many web services out of the box, including Amazon ECS , Akismet, del.icio.us, Flickr, StrikeIron, Yahoo!, Audioscrobbler, and Simpy.
