My initial thoughts on the zend framework are one of excitement. I chose to learn PHP versus another language for many reasons. I can't deny popularity but the ease of procedural PHP was convincing. But OOP is every where now and PHP 5 and soon to be PHP 6 have all you would expect from a modern object oriented language.
So, it was very natural to turn to the Zend Framework. I chose this framework because of the decoupling the framework is based on, backing of a real company and open source community. The framwork has a learning curve no doubt but I will post my thoughts in the months to come...