Saturday, March 20, 2010

Introducing the Zend Framework

The Zend Framework is indeed, in the words of the immortal Ernest Hemingway, a
“moveable feast.” Conceived and implemented as a robust, feature-rich component library for PHP developers, it allows you to quickly and efficiently perform a variety of common application development tasks, including creating and validating form input, processing XML, generating dynamic menus, paginating data, working with Web services, and much, much more!


Perhaps the most important contribution of the Zend Framework, however, is that it has advanced the art of PHP development by introducing PHP developers to a more standardized and structured approach to PHP programming. This structured approach results in cleaner, more maintainable and more secure applications, and it’s one of the key reasons that more and more developers are switching away from the older “ad-hoc” style of programming to the newer, framework-based approach.

For many novice PHP developers, though, the Zend Framework is a scary leap into the unknown. The Model-View-Controller pattern, the loosely coupled architecture, and the large number of available components often serve to befuddle developers who are used to “regular” procedural programming and find framework-based development too complex to understand.

It’s no exaggeration to say that PHP is today one of the most popular programming languages in the world, and the toolkit of choice for millions of Web application developers across the planet. According to recent statistics, the language is in use on more than 22 million Web sites and a third of the world’s Web servers—no small feat, especially when you consider that PHP is developed and maintained entirely by a worldwide community of volunteers with no commercial backing whatsoever!

No comments:

Post a Comment