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Zend Framework preparing for the 1.0 release

Although there are a lot of frameworks available for PHP 5, most notably upcoming Zend Framework 1.0 will be important release as it’s officially supported by Zend. Previous attempts to create reusable components for PHP, like the PEAR-repository (sort of) failed to impress developers. A common problem with the PEAR components is the long dependency tree, to use some relatively small component from PEAR, one might need to include thousands of lines of code to actually use the component. Also since it’s pretty open and loose repository, all components don’t receive same amount of Q&A. From time to time, the components might lose their maintainer and slowly fade away.

This is where Zend Framework comes in. One tightly controlled and integrated framework with Zend’s blessing. All code inside the framework must comfort PHP 5 coding guidelines and E_STRICT. Zend framework includes many important components that usually get reinvented too often. Zend Framework includes packages for Access Control Lists (Example tutorial), Authentication, Session handling, PDO Database wrappers - basic stuff that developers almost always need to write from scratch when working on a project. Using 3rd party framework for your project will undeniably fasten the development time, and if the 3rd party component has active support (security patches) and good usability (Good documentation), there’s very little reason to develop in-house solutions.

Zend brings finally an easy to use MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture to PHP. There’s been several open frameworks available that have implemented MVC programming model, but with Zend Framework, MVC should become more mainstream programming model among the PHP developers. Web services are also important part of the current Internet culture. Like with the MVC, there’s been several implementations for XML-RPC servers, RSS Feed parsers and such with varied amount of support, but Zend finally brings them all easily available in the same package, with support and good documentation.

Zend Framework handles also more rarely used, but definitely important features, like creating PDF documents, Mime-parsers and IMAP-mailbox connections. Zend Framework is a heavy beast, weighting more than 10 megabytes in size, but all components inside the Zend Framework also work as standalone components, which means you can use only the parts you need in your project (Need caching? Grab Zend_Cache package). Of course, ideal situation for the framework usage would be that projects using it would not package it with installation packages, but rather used one shared Framework installation (if found on the server).

Although still waiting for its 1.0 release (at Release Candidate 2 now), Zend Framework promises to ease the development of next-generation web applications with PHP and hopefully reduce “reinventing the wheel” coding. Visit Zend Framework homepage for more information, and don’t forget to read the friendly manual.