PanNotes

Zend, the primary company behind PHP, has just released version 1.0 of the web framework they have been developing for the last 20 months.

Frameworks speed up the development process by providing programmers with a flexible, easy-to-use library of components that solve the majority of the problems that they are likely to encounter. This then frees you up to focus on issues that are unique to your project.

The last few years have seen a explosion in the web framework scene with Rails headlining the list for Ruby developers and Django gaining popularity with many Python programmers. PHP on the other hand hasn’t had any clear winners. CakePHP is definitely popular and Code Igniter has received good reviews, but many people (myslef including) have been anticipating the arrival of the Zend Framework as the PHP Framwework.

ZF sports most of the usual features of today’s frameworks:

• MVC Architecture
• Easy-to-use Database Wrapper/Mapper
• Caching, I18N, Validation, Filtering, Feeds, Web Services
• Built and tested by an active open source community

ZF also has a couple features that differentiate it:

• PHP5 based
• Includes a Lucene compatible search engine component
• Thorough, well written documentation
• Extensive test-suite, with high code coverage and rigorous testing requirements
• Solid community and commercial backing (including contributions form IBM and Google)

All this makes for a very reliable, high-quality project that both individual programmers and large enterprises will feel comfortable working with.

Nevertheless there are a few missing pieces that Zend needs to address in the not so distant future. Some of these are outlined on their roadmap page:

• Better Forms and AJAX support
• Digital Identity Management (OpenID and CardSpace)
• Developer Tools Command-line and IDE

A few things that they don’t mention on the roadmap page but have discussed extensively in the forums are:

• Short, clear tutorial style examples. The documentation is thorough, but it sure ain’t fun to read. They need more examples like this to get people hooked.
• Example code and best practices
• Built in support for handling more advanced templating: two-step views, partitals, inheritance, etc

All in all I am happy to see that 1.0 has finally arrived. I am going to try to carve out some time to re-implement a small PHP app I did in the past using ZF. Should be fun.