Getting Started With Zend Framework: A good tutorial in PDF format, which covers everything about setting up the framework, the necessary directory structure, and designing controllers, views etc. If you’re just beginning, this would be the first document you should go through.

Getting Started With Zend Auth: Even though this tutorial covers Zend Auth, I’d recommend reading it anyways. First of all, most of your applications would need Administrative Access anyways, so Auth is a must component. But that’s not the only thing you learn. This tutorial gives you a good idea of where to put your code, since you’d be dealing with a more or less miniature functional application, even if it simply does the job of logging in and out.

Zend Framework ACL With Example: When talking about Auth, how can one ignore the need for ACL? Today’s web application demand a fully functional and feature rich ACL library, and Zend comes with one. But once again, Zend’s manual is just too technical. This beautiful blog post explains how to use the Zend ACL, along with a much needed example. Again, a useful read if you want to learn the coding structure of Zend Framework.

Official Zend Framework Screencasts: Again, a useful resource. Screencasts are good because you can follow the code being construcuted in real time. But one problem with screencasts is that sometimes, important parts of the code differ from whats given in the manual or in other web tutorials. Though they’re workable, it can get you confused. Do watch the screencasts if you get time, but the first tutorial I mentioned in this post is a must to read.

Official Zend Framework Webinars: This is a collection of webinars. Not arranged in any specific order, they’re like posts of a video blog, covering specific topics at time. Go there and scroll down first. You’ll find many basic tutorials in the very bottom, which you should watch. There are webinars for ACL and Auth too. Check out anything that interests you.

Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP: A good book on developing modern Web 2.0 applications. The book extensively uses Zend Framework and it’s useful components, rather than writing everything from scratch.

That’s all I have now. I’ll see if I can find more tutorials on the web. The above sources are the ones I referred to while learning the framework.

And By The Way! If you know of any good tutorial, or have written one on the Zend Framework, please leave a comment about it. I’ll surely add the ones that are helpful!

Today, frameworks like rails, django and even php frameworks are extremely popular. But with the power of these frameworks, comes more responsibility (Whoa, that’s philosophical).

In Web Hosting forums, a typical hot topic is not how to use these frameworks, since they’re very well documented in the first place, and are quite self-explanatory in their working. The main worry is performance. Can my server handle these many users? Will it crash?

These questions mainly come from shared type of hosting, which have lately started supporting python and ruby platforms. Coming from a PHP background, not many people might have experience on optimizing persistant memory usage of rails or python frameworks. Heck, what could look like a possible memory leak could actually be a feature which you might want to turn off. And the “apparent” solution of throwing more processing power and memory won’t be feasible for many.

Lets say you create an django application, and one dynamic page receives a lot of traffic. Normally, if the page was static, you’d use caching of course. But this one is something like say Digg’s spy tool. So what this page does is simply fetches information, constantly, directly proportional to the amount of traffic it receives, well more or less.

What this page also has is the django overhead loading every time along with it. Now, since I don’t know django very well, I don’t know if a possible solution to such problems might exist within django itself. But if you know of one, you could post a comment below about it.

Now, you could explicitly code this page in framework-less python (i.e. plain python), or if you’re not comfortable with that, even something like PHP (with apc) could do the trick. Now I’m not comparing languages, but simply saying that if you can save the overhead of the framework, you could at least attempt to see if it runs any faster. Now, I’m not telling to code the entire stuff without framework, because that defeats the purpose of using a framework in the first place. Less custom coding means less maintenance trouble.

All the above that I’m saying is with an assumption that there are overheads to frameworks, and they can increase with more feature additions, since this is what I read from various sources about various frameworks.

Your opinion on this topic could be valuable. If you’ve too blogged about something similar, you could post a link to it too .