Ron Del Rosario

I put learning CodeIgniter on hold for a while to take up another PHP framework – the Zend framework. I was actually forced by my coworker/freelance partner to take it up because he started learning Zend and coerced, I mean convinced me to learn it because we were going to use it as our freelance project backbone!

The Full Zend installer is a hefty 10+MB download from the Zend Framework site which includes the framework itself, the Dojo Toolkit, demos and tests. A lighter version is also available, but only contains the Zend framework standard library, which is enough for most projects.

The Zend Framework Mantra

The Zend Framework stands by these three key features :

• Extensible and well-tested code base
• Flexible architecture
• No configuration files necessary to get going

All three features concentrate on one word: Productivity. The framework has almost all the code you’ll ever need in your project, a whooping 4/5 of your total code base can be in the form of the framework itself! You’ll only need to supply your business processes and required rules. Repetitive code like data access and presentation are all handled by the framework. All you need to to is tweak the framework a bit and your set.

Unfortunately…

The framework works, I tried and liked it. But on a local machine. Deploying the project can be quite tedious, especially if your hosting provider (or your own company servers) have several key PHP options disabled. Now I’m pondering what to do if my freelance client’s hosting provider is unable to support the functionality needed. Bah!

Need help with Zend? Ask the Akrabat

If you have trouble using or configuring the Zend framework, one of the best resources on Zend is Rob Allen’s Akra’s DevNotes site. Rob tackles numerous Zend framework topics and posts code online for everyone to try! Tutorial PDFs and zipped code are scattered all over his site! Yeah!