Zend Framework University

Metthew Weier O’Phinney wrote on his blog very good quick start tutorial about Zend_Application and bootstraping ZF applications.

Zend_Application works in conjunction with Zend_Application_Bootstrap, which, as you might guess from its name, is what really does the bulk of the work for bootstrapping your application. It allows you to utilize plugin bootstrap resources, or define local bootstrap resources as class methods. The former allow for re-usability, and the latter for application-specific initialization and configuration.

Additionally, Zend_Application_Bootstrap provides for dependency tracking (i.e., if one resource depends on another, you can ensure that that other resource will be executed first), and acts as a repository for initialized resources. This means that once a resource has been bootstrapped, you can retrieve it later from the bootstrap itself.

From the tutorial one can learn what Zend_Application and Zend_Application_Bootstrap are, how to use them to configure and bootstrap Zend Framework based application, what are resources, resource dependencies and how to write resource methods. This is excellent tutorial for ZF beginners and good quick overview for more advanced users.