# Introduction

Zend_Reflection is a drop-in extension to PHP's own Reflection API, providing several additional features:

- Ability to retrieve return values types.

- Ability to retrieve method and function parameter types.

- Ability to retrieve class property types.

- DocBlocks gain a Reflection class, allowing introspection of docblocks. This provides the ability to determine what annotation tags have been defined as well as to retrieve their values, and the ability to retrieve the short and long descriptions.

- Files gain a Reflection class, allowing introspection of PHP files. This provides the ability to determine what functions and classes are defined in a given file, as well as to introspect them.

- Ability to override any Reflection class with your own variant, for the entire reflection tree you create.

In general, Zend_Reflection works just like the standard Reflection API, but provides a few additional methods for retrieving artifacts not defined in the Reflection API.