Introduction to Zend Framework

Zend Framework is an incredibly useful library for PHP development.

Its homepage can be found at http://framework.zend.com. At the time of writing version 1.6 was available and 1.7 was on preview release.

It particularly simplifies the creation of web 2.0 applications and the integration of external ones such as Flickr, Amazon and Google.

All code within Zend Framework is object-oriented and written in PHP 5.

Zend Framework is based upon a MVC implementation.

Many of the libraries can also be used individually, for example if you were looking to integrate a book search within your website the following example shows how simple it is to use:

$query = new Zend_Service_Amazon_Query('AMAZON_API_KEY');
$query->category('Books')->Keywords('PHP');
$results = $query->search();
foreach ($results as $result) {
    echo $result->Title . '<br />';
}

Alternatively you could use it to find photos on Flickr that match a keyword:

$flickr = new Zend_Service_Flickr('MY_API_KEY');

$results = $flickr->tagSearch("php");

foreach ($results as $result) {
    echo $result->title . '<br />';
}

There is a wide range of functionality available within the framework and I will delve further into these in later posts, they include:

• Authorisation


• Access Control


• Captcha Generation


• Database Integration


• Data Validation


• Email Creation


• PDF Generation


• Webservices Integration