What is "zend"

Zend Framework is a framework for open source, object-oriented web applications, implemented in PHP 5 and licensed under the New BSD License. Zend Framework-often referred to as ZF-is developed with the aim of simplifying web development while promoting best practices in the PHP developer community.

The ZF-at-Will architecture allows developers to reuse components when and where they make sense in their applications without requiring other ZF components beyond the minimum dependencies. There is therefore no paradigm or standard that all Zend Framework users should follow, although ZF provides components for the MVC and Table Gateway design standards that are used in most ZF applications. Zend Framework provides individual components for many other common requirements in web application development, including authentication and authorization via access control lists (ACL), application configuration, data caching, filtering/validating user-provided data for data security and integrity, internationalization, interfaces for AJAX functionality, email composition/delivery, indexing and query in the Lucene search format, and all Google Data Apis with many other popular web services. Because of their weakly coupled project, ZF components can be used relatively to the side of third-party PHP web application frameworks.