All that theory is great as a foundation from which to start exploring and experimenting with the creation of actual framework-based applications. But what really serves to illustrate the usefulness of a framework is to build a small application that leverages a representative collection of the features provided by the framework.
We can't really do this for more than one framework for the simple reason that this chapter would become too long. I would like to preemptively offer my apologies to all proponents of other PHP frameworks. However, since ZF has certainly become one of the most widely adopted frameworks, we will be using it for our project.
The point of this exercise is to give you a whirlwind tour of some of the more commonly used components of ZF. We will see that we can achieve a lot of functionality without having to write a whole lot of code. If at some point, it seems like there is a lot of hand-waving going on, there are two reasons for that. First...