Hockey wrote:Care to demonstrate what you mean by view/controller coupling in Zend and how it'll be improved upon in Skeleton?
I can't speak for Jcart, but I can try to address your question.
I think the simplest example of "view/controller coupling" in ZF is the fact that the Action Controller has a render() method. The ViewRenderer helper takes it a step further, and plenty of people now turn on ViewRenderer in their bootstrap. There is a chunk of code in the Action Controller hardcoded to manage Zend_View and ViewRenderer.
I should note that I don't necessarily have a problem with providing support for Views in the Controller or even combining them when necessary. But ZF through its design seems to do two things in my opinion -- it encourages you to render PHP templates and discourages you from creating actual View objects. You can create View objects, but ZF really considers a PHP template to be the standard presentation logic. Again, this is not necessarily a problem -- especially if you like that solution. By comparison, Skeleton take a more neutral position on Views and considers template libraries to essentially be View objects that wrapper the specified template.
Then there is the requirement to have use their functionality. Zend requires that Action Controllers extend their Zend_Controller_Action class, Skeleton does not. You can use plain objects as and Action Controller if that's all you need, or extend them with the A_Controller_Action if you want that extra functionality (loading, forward, flash, etc.), or roll your own. Naming is also flexible. If you want the extra capitalization and suffix of ZF you can do easily that, but by default Action Controller's names are the same as the action.
And finally is the weight of the Zend classes. For example, though the ViewRender is seen as a shortcut of sorts it actually (like many things) requires a Zend_View to function. So ~15k for the Action Controller, ~20k for the ViewRenderer and another ~20k for the Zend_View -- and all the additional misc. includes. Compare that with ~4k for the Skeleton Action Controller and ~4k for the View and you have a noticeable difference in speed and memory usage. I think for a minimal Hello World using Action Controllers, Skeleton is about 5 times faster. Obviously that is not that important a metric, but it gives you an idea of the general difference -- and with Skeleton you can go lighter, whereas you can only extend with ZF.
I hope that give you a sense of a few of the differences.