What is Zend Framework?

Zend Framework is a simple, straightforward, open-source software framework for PHP 5 designed to eliminate the tedious details of coding and let you focus on the big picture. Its strength is in its highly-modular MVC design, making your code more reusable and easier to maintain.

Goals of Zend Framework components

The following lists the components of Zend Framework, with a 2-3 line description and list of goals for the value that each component provides.

Zend_Acl

Zend_Acl provides lightweight and flexible access control list (ACL) functionality and privileges management.

• includes basic implementations for Roles and Resources
• Role and Resource objects may be instances of user-defined classes
• Resource tree supports rule inheritance
• supports multiple inheritance of access control rules among Roles
• supports conditional rule applicability via an assertion interface

Zend_Auth

Zend_Auth provides an API for authentication and includes concrete authentication adapters for common use case scenarios.

• provides adapter interface for customized authentication mechanisms
• identity storage is abstracted for simple customization
• simple and extensible API

Zend_Cache

Zend_Cache provides a flexible approach toward caching data, including tagging, manipulating, iterating, and removing subsets.

• provides multiple storage backends (File, Sqlite, Memcached...)
• provides multiple frontends (helpers for caching function or method calls, for caching a whole page...)
• simple and flexible for generic uses

Zend_Config

Zend_Config simplifies the use of configuration data for web applications.

• provides a property-based interface for reading configuration data
• supports a variety of hierarchical data storage formats
• supports inheritance of configuration data from one section into another