The last major release of Zend Framework, which happened in 2007, was version 1.0; during the last five years, Zend Framework has undergone a lot of changes to be a successful PHP-based framework. But by merely updating the framework, Zend Framework has retained some of the issues that were inherently present in Zend Framework 1.0.
Zend Framework 2.0 is an attempt to make Zend Framework better by rearchitecting the framework right from the core. Some of the key features of Zend Framework 2.0 over its previous version are listed as follows:
We will get to know about implementing the new features of Zend Framework 2.0 in the coming chapters.
In this chapter we will cover the installation and configuration of some of the prerequisites of Zend Framework 2.0. ZF2 can be installed on most PHP-enabled web servers that support PHP 5.3.3 or later.
We have used Zend Server Community Edition as our default web server; however, any other PHP stack that supports PHP 5.3.3 can be used. Alternatively, you can also download Apache and PHP separately and install PHP over Apache.