Why you should use Zend Framework. Here are some benefits, which motivates web programmers to use it 🙂

Zend Framework is a fully object-oriented framework. So there are a lot of classes and interfaces which can be extended and implemented.

Based on MVC Architecture and consist of collection of class and components. Big library of components and ability to integrate new ones or customised existing. Because of loose coupling it is very easy to do customisation and integration of components.

Integration with ORM (i.e Doctrine) makes it more powerful. It is very easy to integrate other frameworks and templating engines such as JQuery, Smarty.

Zend Framework makes it easy to do TDD via Zend_Test, which uses PHPUnit, a popular unit testing framework. PHPUnit lets you test not only your Controllers, but also your library and model functions.

Because of its multiple components, complexity, and fully object-oriented approach, Zend Framework has a very steep learning curve. It becomes easier to learn due to the comprehensiveness of its documentation and community.