ZF Zend Framework

bwin - Fox - IBM - Indy Speedway - Right Media - Varien - Adooda

bwin Games AB

bwin Interactive AG's subsidiary bwin Games AB based in Stockholm, has completely re-architected their site PokerRoom.com using PHP 5 and Zend Framework.

The bwin Games team makes extensive use of the model-view-controller (MVC) industry-standard for designing web applications. Their multi-tier design uses Zend Framework's MVC implementation, is based on best practices including coding guidelines, and ensures separation of concerns using layers that communicate between the different logical parts of their application. This means their front-end designers can work independently and efficiently in conjunction with server-side PHP developers, meaning everyone saves time, stays in their own areas of expertise, and achieves greater productivity overall.

bwin Games AB, a subsidiary of bwin Interactive Entertainment AG, is a world leader in digital entertainment with a focus on poker and other online gaming. They develop and market everything from stand-alone products, to turnkey solutions in poker, and casino games for digital media. The company owns one of the world's most popular poker networks, Ongame Network, with around 12 million registered players and have several gaming sites, including PokerRoom.com. The bwin Group is the largest publicly traded gaming company in the world that exclusively markets to the gaming public at large.

To read how Zend Framework made bwin Games' re-write possible, including how they have added extensive support for localization and foreign languages and have used Zend Framework's MVC front-controller routing features for SEO (search engine optimization), click here to download this case study.

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Fox Interactive Media - IGN Entertainment division

Fox Interactive Media's IGN Entertainment division is one of the premier providers of online digital entertainment, with properties such as IGN.com, RottenTomatoes.com, and AskMen.com.

IGN Entertainment's team at IGN community sites manages over 50 different community-based sites and has built an entirely new platform based on Zend Framework. Things the team wanted to accomplish with this new platform included:

• Eliminate code duplication in their legacy PHP applications
• Develop code that was easy to maintain and easy to extend
• Build a library of core/base functionality across their sites: articles, comments, ratings, media (video/stills), viewer polls, etc.
• Make extensive use of a database model design with built-in validation
• Use the IGN internal standard templating system Smarty for their producers, designers, and artists
• Boosts in performance were a welcome side-benefit of most of the above

Several different core backend applications existed prior to the IGN community group taking on these sites, but none of them were built on proven best practices or design patterns such as the well-known Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern--IGN needed to improve the codebase so they could work quickly and more efficiently to develop new applications and to make it easier for their online properties to constantly change and adapt to new products and markets.

"Zend Framework is incredibly effective for IGN because it does not impose its structure, and allows us to make our own architectural decisions."

-- Tony Ford, Engineering Manager, IGN Entertainment

Sites already built on Zend Framework include Grand Theft Auto 'Hood, Super Smash Bros World, and Voodoo Extreme, with others being rolled out over time.

To learn more about how Zend Framework made Fox Interactive Media's IGN community sites more responsive, including how they combined different Zend Framework components together to address their own needs, click here to download the full two-page case study.

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IBM Software Group

IBM Research & Development Labs' Emerging Internet Technologies, led by CTO David Boloker, has chosen Zend Framework to build and deliver their ambitious QEDWiki project on.

The QEDWiki browser-based assembly canvas lets business users build mash-ups and situational applications from their own data sources and to design UI and business logic components onscreen. It has been engineered by IBM using many Zend Framework components.

QEDWiki, which allows line of business professionals to assemble mash-ups from disparate web services and other sources on demand, uses Zend Framework to provide Ajax responsiveness and Web Services data to & from QEDWiki, as well as support a number of database adapters that allow QEDWiki users to collect data directly from their enterprise data sources. "From the start we have embraced and contributed to the Zend Framework project, and are very excited to deliver our product based on the release of Zend Framework 1.0" said David Boloker, CTO for Emerging Internet Technologies, IBM Software Group.

David Boloker is a Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Officer for Emerging Internet Technologies in IBM Software Group. He is recognized in and outside IBM as a technical leader in the Internet software space, guiding IBM's investments, as well as internal product development. His responsibilities include building IBM's technical Internet strategy, working with IBM employees to develop appropriate products for the Internet space, researching new areas in software design, as well as guiding a group of researchers.

To learn more about how Zend Framework made IBM's QEDWiki project possible, click here to download this case study.

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Indianapolis Motor Speedway

Home of the Indy 500 race and owned by the Clabber Girl corporation (est. 1879), the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS) maintains over two dozen sites and they have chosen to standardize their PHP website development on Zend Framework.

Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a LAMP stack shop, using exclusively open-source based code, but also making use of key enabling tools from Zend, including Zend Studio for Eclipse and the web application server Zend Platform.

Some of the new Zend Framework 1.5 features the IMS team is using are:

• Layouts - let's IMS punch-in new content and rapidly deploy it
• Action Helpers & Partials - allows IMS to separate their code into logical parts, making them easier to use in conjunction with the best practice coding standards ZF promotes
• Zend_View_Enhanced - a new standard IMS uses to build plugins and action helpers
• Zend_Cache - for caching, supported by the Zend application server, Zend Platform

With a 20% drop in page load times for their sites using Zend Framework, you will want to click here to download this case study and find out how the Indianapolis Motor Speedway punched up their performance with Zend Framework.

bwin - Fox - IBM - Indy Speedway - Right Media - Varien - Adooda

Right Media

In 2005 Right Media launched the Right Media Exchange, in which advertisers and publishers buy and sell online ad placements in real time through auctions, with Right Media’s optimization technology predicting where the ads will work best.

Today in 2007, Right Media serves 4 to 5 billion ads per day and at times processes over 100,000 requests/second. They have a network of 19,000 advertisers and publishers that access the platform to enter, update, confirm, and place advertisements. However, with the success of the Exchange came some problems.

At first Right Media provided their customers a Windows-based desktop application to let users post ads, create inventory, bid, and sell on the auction, track results, etc. But that solution turned out to be unworkable because the product was hard to maintain, and the team was overwhelmed by support issues and customers’ resistance to frequent updates that were needed to add new and improved functionality.

Click here to download this case study and find out how using Zend Framework and PHP helped Right Media develop an easy to use, rich web application that solved these problems and that could be used by all of their customers.

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Varien

In business since 2001, Varien has been building e-commerce solutions for major clients for over half the lifetime of significant e-commerce on the web.

The Magento open-source e-commerce engine that Varien has developed uses PHP 5 and Zend Framework because of the large open-source ecosystem that supports and enhances their investment in Zend Framework.

"We considered Java & Struts, and had many discussions among our team on which technology to use for Magento (our new e-commerce engine), but once we knew Zend was behind the open-source Zend Framework, encapsulating and supporting the features we needed for our large corporate and enterprise clients, we immediately chose Zend Framework. We're extremely happy with our decision," said Roy Rubin, CEO at Varien.

Find out how Zend Framework made Varien's Magento e-commerce engine possible: Click here to download this case study and discover how Zend Framework's community support, object-oriented library of pre-built code, a flexible architecture, corporate friendly licensing, and a clear roadmap for the future made the decision to go with Zend Framework one that "really reduce[s] our development time and [lets us] better service our clients."

bwin - Fox - IBM - Indy Speedway - Right Media - Varien - Adooda

Adooda

adooda.co.uk was founded by Michael Tuckwell and earlier this year he hired a small team to begin building his platform. He wanted to get to market in a matter of months.

Tuckwell explains, "Fees were always increasing [for online sales] and it was never clear at the outset how many there were or how much they cost. Listing fees, final sale fees, and many others really added up."

The Adooda team chose Zend Framework and PHP 5 to do so and have delivered above and beyond what Tuckwell imagined was possible for making his idea into an operating web site and business.

"We can easily set up our own templates now and just hand them off to our designer, which means our designer doesn't specifically need to know the ins and outs of Zend Framework, and they can get on with what they do best, which is designing the site."
-- Colin Seamans, Senior Developer, Adooda

Click here to download this case study and read more about how Zend Framework's MVC, XML support, templates, web services, i18n support and more, meant Adooda could get to market in record time.