Earlier this month, Zend has released version 1.0 of their Zend Framework, their first production release. Some of the notable features of this robust development framework:
- Powerful MVC framework
- Database access solution that balances ORM with efficiency and simplicity
- Lucene-compatible search engine
- Advanced I18N support
- Robust authentication/authorization classes and input filtering
- Rich web services client interfaces, including Google Data APIs and StrikeIron
- Many other useful classes to make you as productive as possible
- Thorough and high-quality test suites and documentation
- Open-source development process with an active community provides continuous review and testing
Claiming to be the best suited PHP5 framework for meeting business needs, ZF should make significant headway into widespread use considering it can leverage its direct link to PHP itself, similarly a product attributed to Zend itself. The question though is will ZF be able to eat into the Ruby on Rails crowd?