About Zend Framework

Extending the art & spirit of PHP, Zend Framework is based on simplicity, object-oriented best practices, corporate friendly licensing, and a rigorously tested agile codebase. Zend Framework is focused on building more secure, reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications & web services, and consuming widely available APIs from leading vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr, as well as API providers and cataloguers like StrikeIron and ProgrammableWeb.

Expanding on these core themes, we have implemented Zend Framework to embody extreme simplicity & productivity, the latest Web 2.0 features, simple corporate-friendly licensing, and an agile well-tested code base that your enterprise can depend upon.

Extreme Simplicity & Productivity

We designed Zend Framework with simplicity in mind. To provide a lightweight, loosely-coupled component library simplified to provide 4/5s of the functionality everyone needs and that lets you customize the other 20% to meet your specific business needs. By focusing on the most commonly needed functionality, we retain the simplified spirit of PHP programming, dramatically lower the learning curve, and your training costs – so developers get up-to-speed quickly. We do this with:

• Extensible and
  well-tested code base
• Flexible architecture
• No configuration files
  necessary to get going

Frameworks and best practices mean reduced training costs and quicker time-to-market – important factors in adoption decisions. Built so you can pick and choose just the pieces you need to turbocharge your web applications – all your developers know where to find their PHP / Zend Framework code, speeding new development and reducing maintenance costs.

Latest Web Development Features

• AJAX support through JSON – meet the ease-of-use requirements your users have come to expect
• Search – a native PHP edition of the industry-standard Lucene search engine
• Syndication – the data formats & easy access to them your Web 2.0 applications need
• Web Services – Zend Framework aims to be the premier place to consume & publish web services
• High-quality, object-oriented PHP 5 class library – attention to best practices like design patterns, unit testing, & loose coupling

Friendly & Simple Licensing, Safe for the Enterprise

Based on the simple and safe new BSD license, with Zend Framework's License, you rest assured that your code is compliant, unimpeachable, and protected as you see fit. We also require all contributors to the open source Zend Framework to complete and sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) — which is based on the standard open-source Apache license — protecting your own intellectual property (that is, your added-value) built on Zend Framework.

Fully Tested – Extend Safely and Easily

Tested. Thoroughly. Enterprise-ready and built with agile methods, Zend Framework has been unit-tested from the start, with stringent code coverage requirements to ensure that all code contributed has not only been thoroughly unit-tested, but also remains stable and easy for you to extend, re-test with your extensions, and further maintain.

from:http://framework.zend.com/about/overview