The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial they posted recently on using the Zend_Tool component to make starting a new Zend Framework application from scratch a much simpler thing.

This tutorial will set you through using Zend_Tool to jump-start development on your next ZF MVC application. Zend_Tool is both RAD tools as well as a framework for exposing your own set of tooling needs to the Zend_Tool user interface. While the areas in which extending Zend_Tool are exhaustive, we will focus merely on obtaining and using the current Zend_Tool toolset.

The tutorial walks you through the installation of the component, how to set it up correctly as a "binary" and how to automatically create a new project with a simple "create project" call. He also points out the ability it has to define some of the basic files for actions of your choosing.