Similar to Spring and especially Rails, the agile open source and lightweight PHP-based Zend Framework is focused on building more secure, reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications and web services, and consuming widely available APIs from leading vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo , and Flickr, as well as API providers and cataloguers like StrikeIron and ProgrammableWeb. The Definitive Guide to Zend Framework lets you dive into the Zend Framework, top to bottom. Learn and implement an extensible and well-tested code base that is easy to augment. Understand and use Zend's flexible architecture. Employ the framework for even your most complex enterprise PHP applications in the most cost-effective manner for timely production. What you'll learn Make use of MVC, the industry standard web application design pattern (which originated with one of the first scripting languages ever built, Smalltalk). MVC allows developers and web designers to separate their concerns and skills, making code implementation and design easily and clearly separated. No more confusion or needing both skill sets in one person. Employ web services using Zend APIs as available from/with Google, Microsoft, StrikeIron, and more. See how Zend supports Ajax, PDF generation, e-mail communication, and search, all an increasingly important part of web applications today. Zend Framework simplifies a developer's life and gives you built-in support for these essential, if not critical, features for your application. Use standard database programming best practices. Data adapters for all major databases abstract away the details, so you can build your application (domain of your business) models on whatever databaseengine you need. Localize your application for a particular language and culture. This is imperative, not an afterthought. Do so easily, whenever you're ready to expand your markets, with Zend Framework's support for internationalization (i18n). Secure your Zend applications via ACL, authentication, and sessions. Who is this book for? PHP developers looking to find a Rails-like framework that is based on PHP, still the most widely used web scripting language Related Titles Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional, Third Edition The Definitive Guide to Zend Enterprise The Definitive Guide to symfony