What is the Zend Framework?
The Zend Framework is a software framework written in PHP. It is a powerful high-quality open-source framework, its main focus targets the development of modern web applications and popular web services. It is intended as a practical and reasonable solution for common web application purposes. It has ready-made components for Amazon, Last.fm, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Google and more. The Zend Framework has adopted a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. This enables developers to differentiate the separate constituents of an application in order to make its development and maintenance much easier and simpler to handle. Zend also supplies developers with a set of classes for building web applications or connecting different web services.

Overview of the Zend Framework
The first thing that we have to mention about the Zend Framework is that it is software entirely written in PHP v.5. PHP v.5 represents a major advancement over the previous models of Object Oriented programming in PHP. And that may well be one of the main reasons why you should choose the Zend Framework. Zend version 1.7.0 and all later Zend versions require PHP v.5.2.4, or later, to be supported on the server.

The framework is built on the bases of modular components. These may be used as standalone solutions or coupled with other components. That makes the Zend framework structure very flexible indeed. Many interfaces have been created to make the different components as extensible and portable, as well as loosely dependent on each other, as possible.

Link to the official website: http://framework.zend.com