The components that have been implemented in this preview release are :

Zend_Controller and Zend_View

These components provide the base for a simple MVC website and are already used on this site and several others. A front controller dispatches requests to page controllers. It is as minimalist as possible and we're working to make it even simpler. The Zend_View component provides encapsulation for view logic. It can use templates written in PHP or can be combined with a third-party template engine.

Zend_Db

Database access is a very light layer on top of PDO. Solutions existing systems not using PDO (such as mysqli or oci8) are presently under development. Included are adapters, a profiler, a tool to assist with building everyday SELECT statements, and simple objects for working with table row data.

Zend_Feed

The links on the sidebars of our home page are generated using Zend_Feed. This component provides a very simple way to consume RSS and Atom data from feeds. It also includes utilities for discovering feed links, importing feeds from different sources, and feeds can even be modified and saved back as valid XML.

Zend_HttpClient

This component provides a client for the HTTP protocol and does not require any PHP extensions. It drives our web services components. In time, we will develop support for extension-based backends such as cURL.

Zend_InputFilter

The input filtering component encourages the development of secure websites by providing the basic tools necessary for input filtering and validation.

Zend_Json

Easily convert PHP structures into JSON for use in AJAX-enabled applications.

Zend_Log

Log data to the console, flat files, or a database. Its no-frills, simple, procedural API reduces the hassle of logging to one line and is perfect for cron jobs and error logs.

Zend_Mail and Zend_Mime

Almost every internet application needs to send email. Zend_Mail, assisted by Zend_Mime, creates email messages and sends them. It supports attachements and does all the MIME dirty work.

Zend_Pdf

Portable Document Format (PDF) from Adobe is the de facto standard for cross-platform rich documents. Now, PHP applications can create PDF documents on the fly, without the need to call utilities from the shell, depend on PHP extensions, or pay licensing fees. Zend_PDF can even modify existing PDF documents. Create a sharp customer invoice in Adobe Photoshop, fill in the order from Zend_Pdf, and send it with Zend_Mail.

Zend_Search_Lucene

The Apache Lucene engine is a powerful, feature-rich Java search engine that is flexible about document storage and supports many complex query types. Zend_Search_Lucene is a port of this engine written entirely in PHP 5, allowing PHP-powered websites to leverage powerful search capabilities without the need for web services or Java. Zend_Search_Lucene's file format is fully binary with its Java counterpart.

Zend_Service: Amazon, Flickr, and Yahoo!

Web services are becoming increasingly important to the PHP developer as mashups and composite applications become the standard for next generation web applications. The Zend Framework provides wrappers for service APIs from three major providers to make the as simple to use as possible. We're working on more and engaging API vendors directly to make PHP the premier platform for consuming web services.

Zend_XmlRpc

PHP 5's SOAP extension dramatically lowered the bar for communicating with SOAP services from PHP. Zend_XmlRpc brings the same capabilities to XML-RPC, mimmicking the SOAP extension and making these services easier to use than ever from PHP 5.

First impression

The current preview release is very promising and already provide many enterprise ready components for web development around email, AJAX, WebServices, PDF, Feeds, Logs, Database, Searching and indexing data ... The future plans are more promising and will include : Increase support for Web Services API providers, support for XML Databases, OO-RDBMS mapping, Tooling, Auth & ACL, Security enhancements, Support for additional file formats and an improvement for existing modules.

The framework is based around the class Zend which is the foundation class of the Zend Framework. It contains only static methods, and these methods contain functionality that is required by many components in the Zend Framework.

Usage of Zend Framework

Using Zend Framework is very similar to PEAR, for example to load the feed module, you include Zend/Feed.php, then you can directly use the different functions available in this module.

<?php
/**
 * Consume an RSS feed and display all of the titles and 
 * associated links within.
 */

require_once 'Zend/Feed.php';

$feed = Zend_Feed::import('http://news.google.com/?output=rss');

foreach ($feed->items as $item) {
    
    echo "<p>" . $item->title() . "<br />";
    echo $item->link()  . "</p>";
    
}

?>

Conclusion

After this preview release I think that Zend Framework will be tested by the community and receive feedbacks, bugs, suggestions and idea to improve it. We know that the framework have been developped by a community of expert which envolved many known figures in the PHP Community and others, this will make it more easy to use, robust and modern framework which could help in building future websites.

For more informations : http://framework.zend.com/
Download available at : http://framework.zend.com/download