Zend Framework and Why It Matters
One of the aspects that I believe that has kept PHP from gaining significant ground as a legitimate enterprise language is that it hasn’t had the tools to prove that it is beyond merely a hobbyist’s tool or just merely a language that is good for building prototypes of an application. I don’t think anyone will say that PHP slows down the development process, but a lot of people outside the PHP community (and inside) would say that PHP can make for very sloppy, insecure code.
They would be correct. One can say that about any language but PHP enables just about anyone to sit down and build an application without them really needing to know what they are doing. PHP gives the coder a large amount of power without babysitting them. This strength has also caused a lot of problems as it has let coders get away with a lot of things that have lead to large security holes.
One thing that can help mitigate a lot of bad coding mistakes is to use a good set of tools to help the coder make the correct decisions. While nothing can replace good training in both PHP syntax and coding in general, one of the strongest tools a coder can give themselves is a framework that has taken care of many of the common tasks associated with application building. The Zend Framework, while being a somewhat new kid on the block in terms of frameworks, gives a coder a large amount of usable code to speed up development while making sure that good design decisions are enforced.