As web developers we are always looking for ways to improve our systems and working practices. We have to move fast and handle ever-changing requirements from our managers, although this is what makes our work so exciting and challenging. A very important tool that can meet today's fast-changing needs is the basic framework you use to build your application. This forms the basis of your application, and if you have a good framework then you should have fewer problems in the future. A good example is Ruby on Rails, a very popular and successful framework. It has certainly gone a long way in popularizing the use of frameworks, especially in the PHP community, with a lot of PHP developers choosing to switch to Ruby. Why? Well Ruby on Rails will provide you with a lot of very good tools and I can see why people are drawn to it. But the PHP communities are never ones to sit around and since the release of PHP5 there has been a surge of new PHP5 frameworks released. So with all these frameworks what's the best? Well, if you bought this book you have probably already chosen to use the Zend Framework. But I would say use whatever tool fits your project best. All the frameworks out there have good and bad points; it is up to you as a web developer to assess your needs and choose your tools.