From rather humble beginnings as the “Personal Home Page” scripting language, PHP has found its way into almost every server, corporation, and dev shop in the world. On an average day, somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million coders do something in PHP. Even when you use a well-understood language like PHP, building a modern web application requires tools that decrease development time and cost while improving code quality. Frameworks such as Ruby-on-Rails and Django have been getting a lot of attention as a result.

For PHP coders, Zend Framework offers that same promise without the need to move away from PHP. This powerful collection of components can be used in part or as a whole to speed up the development process.

Zend Framework has the backing of Zend Technologies; the driving force behind the PHP programming language in which it is written. The first production release of the Zend Framework became available in July of 2007.

Zend Framework in Action is a comprehensive tutorial that shows how to use Zend Framework to create web-based applications and web services.

This book takes you on an "over-the-shoulder" tour of the components of Zend Framework as you build a high quality, real-world web application. This book fully supports version 1.5 of Zend Framework and is organized around the techniques you'll use every day as a web developer-data handling, forms, authentication, and so forth. As you follow the running example, you'll learn to build interactive Ajax- driven features into your application without sacrificing nuts-and-bolts considerations like security and performance.

This book is aimed at the competent PHP developer who wants to master framework-driven web development. Zend Framework in Action goes beyond the docs but still provides quick access to the most common topics encountered in the development of web applications.

WHAT'S INSIDE

This book includes a wealth of practical examples and explanations, including,

• Zend Framework Model-View-Controller application architecture
• Database management
• Application security through filtering and validating data
• Authorizing users and controlling access
• Incorporating Ajax
• Talking with other applications using web services
• Speeding up pages with caching
• Making your application international
• Generating PDF content
• Integrating other PHP libraries with the framework

Reflecting the Zend Framework's own emphasis on thorough testing and best practices, the book further promotes the benefits of testing during development and before deployment. This book will illustrate ways in which using the Zend Framework can greatly reduce development time and cost while improving the quality.

About the Authors

Rob Allen has been programming with PHP for over seven years and is a member of the Zend Framework community. He is a contributor to the Zend Framework, developing the Zend_Config component with the help of many ideas from the mailing list. He has also written a popular getting-started tutorial available from www.akrabat.com. He holds a Masters degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Birmingham and started out writing C++ Windows applications. He now concentrates solely on web-based applications in PHP. Rob is the Technical Director of Big Room Internet concentrating on the company's content management framework and future technologies.

Nick Lo is a web designer, developer, partner, and general ‘wearer of many hats’ with Ingredients, located in Byron Bay, Australia. Having formally trained as a designer, he initially taught himself programming to automate the more tedious aspects of printed catalog production. Since 1998 his involvement with website design and development has taken him further ‘under the hood’, working on a broad range of web-based applications from community portals to university research projects. His involvement in the Zend Framework began as an early participant in the community, gaining recognition through several online tutorials.

Steven Brown started using PHP in 1998 but has developed using many other languages including Java, Actionscript, Lingo and Javascript. He has worked on desktop applications, multimedia CDs, websites, web applications, and more recently has worked on projects involving video and AJAX, while maintaining a focus on performance, reliability and security. Steven was introduced to the Zend Framework by Nick Lo and quickly adopted it as a replacement for his own core application code on several major projects. When he's not programming Steven enjoys driving or working on cars.

WHAT REVIEWERS ARE SAYING

“By far the best resource I've found on the topic...I have longed to see a book that takes a professional end-to-end approach such as this one.”
—Eddie Haber, Engineer/Architect, MetaFoundry

“Zend Framework in Action is a good book to discover all the components of the framework...”
—Sylvain Do Jorge Marco, translated from Developpez.com

“If you are interested in Zend Framework, then Zend Framework in Action is the #1 resource...4.5 stars out of 5.”
—Endijs Lisovskis, blogger