Although there are many things to consider when picking a development framework, you can't really go wrong with most of the established and actively maintained ones. Frameworks like Cake, Symfony, and Zend Framework overlap to a large degree in terms of the problems they solve. However, you can make your life easier by doing your homework and selecting a framework that suits your development philosophy and style. After reading this chapter, you should be able to look at the offering of frameworks out there and ask the right questions to narrow down the field.
Although I used Zend Framework as an example to show what a framework can add to your development effort, I certainly urge you to consider other options. I like that most of the ZF components are pretty loosely coupled. Although, the Zend_Application
module in conjunction with ZF's full MVC implementation doesn't feel quite as loosely coupled as ZF used to. Either way, it is still possible to add individual ZF modules to your...