Zend Framework

Zend is a PHP project published by the Zend Company, as well as by a large community of open source contributors. This framework structures PHP developments by providing them with a more professional dimension, thanks to an organized development setting.

Just like the PHP Symfony framework, Zend was created for companies and for large, innovative PHP projects. This framework is not recommended for projects implemented on a smaller scale, such as a simple website. It is a practical tool oriented towards productivity. It comes with an extremely large and comprehensive catalog of web applications and features. With the Zend Framework, risk-taking in the process of developing a complex web application is significantly reduced.

This project was created to meet various objectives:

• To facilitate and increase development reliability of dynamic sites with PHP,
• To decrease the duration of software development,
• To simplify maintenance and code recovery, in cases of existing projects,
• To industrialize code methods in PHP.

Zend uses:

• Dependency administrator Compose,
• PHP UNIT and Travis CI (ongoing integration solution to automate the process of publishing GitHub projects)

The MVC template

Zend Framework uses the MVC template (Model-View-Controller), which dissociates data from the user interface, as well as from processing.

The Template

The template represents the data structure of a web project: it is dedicated to data processing. It interacts with the database by allowing to read and to insert items into it. It allows the performance of tuple (computing) updates. It also verifies that the data is well-formatted.

The View

In view of the fact that all events and user actions are grouped together (in an HTML table, as well as in PDF, or in XML format), page templates and the results are visible.

The Controller

The Controller’s role is to manage the program flow. It synchronizes user actions to the database.

This type of separation between Model - View - Controller improves readability and facilitates code handling. Thanks to the MVC’s design and structure, the separation between the user interface and the programming aspect is truly optimized. This type of structure is a significant advantage for web applications that require regular design adjustments.

Why use the Zend framework instead of coding everything manually? The use of Zend is justified by many reasons:

A well-documented framework

Being an open-source package, this framework is supported by a large community of developers and contributors. Its documentation is available in 6 languages.

A highly structured certification program

Zend Framework offers a subtly crafted certification program. All standard steps have certification. The offered certifications cover all levels: from beginner to experienced PHP developer.

Flexible architecture

It is possible to easily and quickly set up the following functionalities on a web application, with components and classes:

• User management: authentication,
• CRUD function to create and manage data,
• Caching web documents,
• The integration of a Captcha.

The component library is very well-supplied and allows you to choose from component types and subtypes in order to use components that do not depend on other components (in most cases). This is called unlimited use architecture.

Cache management is optimized

Zend_cache is a component of Zend Framework caching. It offers a variety of types of information storage. Just activate it.

Develop faster with less code

The developer uses components already ready for use. Only a small part of the application will be programmed. The developer gains a lot of time on the installation of the components and therefore develops faster. It is no longer necessary to install libraries such as jQuery or DatePicker with Zend, because they are already integrated into the framework.

Zend Framework and Symfony are two references. To make a choice between these two frameworks, rely on the expertise of our technical teams in one of our offshore web agencies. These two powerful frameworks, built in an intelligent way, will be separated by the type of software that you want to set up. Other alternatives such as Node.js, Java or JavaScript also exist.