Zend Framework

Zend Framework is one of the duo of leaders in PHP frameworks, alongside Symfony. It is one of the most commonly used PHP frameworks.

The design of Zend Framework 2 uses a component based approach with very weak connections.  It can be installed via Composer or Pyrus. It includes a dependency injection component, HTTP cache management, and a basic project structure. As with version 1, each component can be used separately.  This version is based on PHP 5.3 and its upgrades, such as namespace management.
 The framework provides the components needed to create MVC applications, with database abstraction. It should however be noted that Zend Framework does not include ORM, but rather a lightweight table gateway interface. From a general point of view, Zend Framework offers a very broad range of components. Among others, these include Zend\Authentification for user authentication, Zend\Soap for SOAP management, and services like ZendService\Twitter for social network integration of 140 character posts.
There is no bridge available between Zend Framework 1 and Zend Framework 2; complete refactoring is needed in order to switch between framework versions.
Zend Framework requires PHP 5.3.3 and supports all the databases managed by PDO.