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Zend Framework is fast becoming one of the standard frameworks for building secure, reliable and modern applications. It is a loosely coupled framework providing a flexible use-at-will architecture that allows the developer to pick and choose which components to use for a project.

One key set of compoents provided is an implementation of the Model-View-Controller design pattern which provides a mechanism for building applications where different parts of the code are separated depending on their role in the application.

In this session, we will discuss Zend Framework’s capabilities and what it has to offer the developer. We will then explore Zend Framework’s MVC components and look at how they fit together. Finally we will build a simple Zend Framework MVC application from scratch so that we can look in detail at the code.

In detail, we will look at the following:

• What is theZend Framework?
• MVC and Zend Framework
• What is MVC
• An overview of Zend Framework’s implemenation of MVC and other relevant design patterns.
• Building a Zend Framework application
• Bootstrapping and setting up
• The model
• The controller
• actions
• action helpers
• The view
• master layout scripts
• action view scripts
• view helpers