In the article, I begin by introducing Zend's motivations for creating a framework and how it relates to their PHP Collaboration Project. More information on these topics can be found on the Zend Framework website. I then dive into a tutorial where I take a business scenario and show how the components included in the Zend Framework can be put to work.

The article demonstrates a workflow where invoice data is retrieved from a web service, an invoice in PDF format is then built from that data, and finally the resultant file is emailed to a customer. The components Zend_XmlRpc_Client, Zend_Pdf, Zend_Mail, and Zend_Search_Lucene are explored along the way.