Zend Benefits Greatly From The Vibrant Php Ecosystem

Zend Framework (ZF) is completely free for development and distribution, which is, is open-source and free to download. It is easy to build your own commercial intellectual property on the Zend Framework. An Apache-like Contributor License Agreement (CLA) process assures that the code is free of legal issues. The software is a fully object-oriented PHP 5 class library, with attention to best design practices. It has been tested thoroughly with about 90,000 lines of test code for 140,000 lines of framework code, where all contributors were asked to submit test code and documentation with every submission. Zend Framework is renowned for extreme simplicity, modular “use-at-will” architecture for easy migration and ability to share Zend Framework code with your current applications and even with other frameworks if necessary.

Due to its modular “use-at-will” architecture, Zend Framework can be used with any/all frameworks. As a result, bolting on the Lucene search engine, adding PDF generation/editing, or even re-architecting your app to be a modern model-view-controller web app can all be done to greater or lesser degrees, depending on which other framework you are working with.

As opposed to Ruby on Rails, the Zend Framework lets you use as much or as little of the framework as you wish, making it very easy to adopt it gradually for existing code bases. Since PHP is the technology used for many web applications, including Yahoo, Facebook and YouTube, these sites drive the decision for many commercial developers to PHP, and subsequently to Zend Framework.

However, Zend does not have control over PHP, although some of its employees are active participants in the decisions of the open source community. Zend benefits greatly from the vibrant PHP ecosystem and tries to give back to this community whenever possible. It has many of the developers who work on maintenance and future versions of PHP on its payroll and also supports major open source projects like Zend Framework and the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT).

PHP being a server-side language works just fine with Silverlight & Flex. Flex and PHP work together beautifully. Additionally, Microsoft (one of Zend’s partner) has released an Atlas-based Ajax toolkit for PHP which further strengthens the usage of PHP and other client-side technologies like Silverlight and Flex/Flash.

Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications. Zend’s founders are the architects of PHP, which is used by more than 22 millio
Web sites.