Concerns with the Zend Framework
Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2007 10:13 pm
I recently changed jobs and left my custom PHP web framework behind.
As opposed to starting over and rewriting it entirely, I've spent the last few weeks researching other frameworks across many different langages. I've looked at Grails (Java), C# and .net (great language-- horrible framework), RoR, dozens of PHP frameworks including Cake, Symfony, Seagull, CodeIgnitor, ZF, and many others. They all seem to be pretty similar, but so far I just haven't one that seemed to have the right balance of flexibility, power, and maturity.
I've been using ZF for a few days now and think that it's got the most potential, but at the same time, I really dislike some of the core functionality. For example, by the time you do anything constructive with a Zend view, you end up with a complete and total mess. It's like some sick, deformed bastard offspring of PHP and HTML and it defeats the whole purpose of breaking out your view, IMHO. Like many people, I ended up ripping out the view stuff entirely and replacing it with Smarty (which is actually pretty nice). Then I started working with the database classes and quickly realized that its relational ORM support is severely lacking.
I realize that its still pre-release, but ZF has been around for quite a while. It seems to me that ORM would be a more important core library than.. oh.. say.. Amazon and Yahoo service clients. Every implementation of ZF that I've seen has rewritten huge chunks of the core functionality. Astrum Futura, for example, looks like it's replaced both the model and the view functionality. On one hand, it's impressive that these core modules can be replaced so easily, but on another, it's discouraging that its so fundamentally necessary at this point. Worse, once you've ripped out or overridden all these core modules, what's going to happen when you start trying to incorporate updates to the ZF framework.
So I guess I'm just curious what other people think that have been following the project longer than I have. Is ZF 1.0 going to be usable in production? How stable is it at this point (do updates break apps?) Is the core still fundamentally evolving or are these core classes (db/view/controller) about where they are intended to be? All comments are welcome!
I've been using ZF for a few days now and think that it's got the most potential, but at the same time, I really dislike some of the core functionality. For example, by the time you do anything constructive with a Zend view, you end up with a complete and total mess. It's like some sick, deformed bastard offspring of PHP and HTML and it defeats the whole purpose of breaking out your view, IMHO. Like many people, I ended up ripping out the view stuff entirely and replacing it with Smarty (which is actually pretty nice). Then I started working with the database classes and quickly realized that its relational ORM support is severely lacking.
I realize that its still pre-release, but ZF has been around for quite a while. It seems to me that ORM would be a more important core library than.. oh.. say.. Amazon and Yahoo service clients. Every implementation of ZF that I've seen has rewritten huge chunks of the core functionality. Astrum Futura, for example, looks like it's replaced both the model and the view functionality. On one hand, it's impressive that these core modules can be replaced so easily, but on another, it's discouraging that its so fundamentally necessary at this point. Worse, once you've ripped out or overridden all these core modules, what's going to happen when you start trying to incorporate updates to the ZF framework.
So I guess I'm just curious what other people think that have been following the project longer than I have. Is ZF 1.0 going to be usable in production? How stable is it at this point (do updates break apps?) Is the core still fundamentally evolving or are these core classes (db/view/controller) about where they are intended to be? All comments are welcome!