I think it's supposed to be, but every time I've looked at using Zend, I always get the impression that you can't just give or take individual pieces of Zend li

I think it's supposed to be, but every time I've looked at using Zend, I always get the impression that you can't just give or take individual pieces of Zend like you can with CI. Certain bits of the framework are interdependent on other bits, and before you know it you're pulling in about 50 of its core components just to make a basic MVC application. But then again, I haven't looked at Zend in the last year or so; perhaps its gotten better in the mean time.