<p>I've seen it mentioned in many blogs around the net, but I believe it shoud be discussed here.
What can we do when we have an MVC framework (I am interested in ZEND) in PHP but our host does not provide mod_rewrite?
Are there any "short-cuts"? Can we transfer control in any way (so that a mapping may occur between pages)? Any ideas?
Thank you :-)</p>

mod_rewrite is almost essential in today's hosting environment..but unfortunately not everyone got the message.
Lots of the large php programs (I'm thinking magento, but most can cope) have a pretty-url fall back mode for when mod_rewrite isn't available.
URLs end up looking like www.site.com/index.php?load-this-page
They must be running some magic to grab the variable name from the $_GET variable and using it as the selector for what module/feature to execute.
In a related note, I've seen lots of messed up URLs in the new facebook site where it's using the #.  So links look like www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/inbox/  Clearly we're not meant to see that but it suggests that they're probably parsing the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] variable.