In the past few years, web development has become a very competitive arena for programming languages, frameworks, libraries and IDE’s. As a result, there has been a plethora of options for programmers to choose from. In most cases, a significant amount of time can be spent on searching for tools to speed up development instead of recreating from scratch. This article is aimed at php developers who are looking to learn more about how not to reinvent the wheel, in particular, with the new Zend framework. This is not a comparative list of all php frameworks, as there are many good ones out there, CakePHP and Symphony to name two. I’ve evaluated other frameworks to some degree, not exhaustively by any means, and the Zend framework seems to fit nicely with my requirements. It may not for you, but I’ll try to persuade you in this article :).