Comments on: PHP Framework Comparison: Zend Framework

By: Barna blogol » Blog Archive » Kétségeim

Barna blogol » Blog Archive » Kétségeim — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 21:33:42 +0000

[...] a cikkjeibe, a The no-framework PHP MVC framework passzol a gondolatmentemhez. Hozzájött még ez és ez és [...]

By: Paul Rouke and PRWD on User Centered Design » Blog Archive » PHP Framework Comparison: Kohana

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:20:29 +0000

[...] my earlier posts on Zend Framework and Symfony, the final part of my comparison will be an evaluation of [...]

By: Wil Sinclair

Wil Sinclair — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:19:23 +0000

Thanks for the clarifications!
The QuickStart is back under active development, and I think I’ve found a way to do it so that it remains succinct for the people who want to get going fast, yet informative for the people who want some more background. Stay tuned. I’ll try to remember to come back here and post a note once it’s done.
Askeet is simply awesome and model of what all frameworks should aspire to in their tutorial apps. That said, we just haven’t found the time to do something similar at Zend. Fortunately, one of our community members has stepped up with an extended blog tutorial: http://blog.astrumfutura.com/index.php?/plugin/tag/tutorial. I’ll ping him about if/when he plans to finish it off and format the content in a more sequential and consolidated way.
Self-referential links in the ref guide? Great idea! I’ll take a look at how to do this with docbook.
RE: Community. I honestly don’t think this is an accurate description of our community. We are putting together 1.6 RC1 right now; much more than half of the code has been written by community members. Zend does try to bring a little order to the chaos with our Proposal Process and issue tracking workflow- certainly more so than many other OS projects- but we are very careful about remaining open to all and encouraging community contributions. Maybe you can drop by our contributor IRC channel to see how we roll. #zftalk.dev on freenode
Did you see our site before the 1.5 release? Could be that we’ve just over-corrected a bit. Seriously, tho, we don’t want to obscure the origins and intentions behind the project; the site is definitely geared towards selling developers and decision makers alike on ZF. I can see your point here but if the site changes significantly, it will only be to execute on this strategy more effectively. The site isn’t maintained by our marketing department, but I certainly take their advice when planning updates.
Hmmmm. . . the post. It’s great getting back to things you’ve written a month ago, isn’t it? I don’t see any problem with what I wrote. But then again, it is my opinion after all. I didn’t mention his doing it himself because we already had plans, and I didn’t want to encourage him to duplicate that effort. 1.6 RC1 is coming out next week, and it doesn’t include a file upload form element, after all. I believe I would have sincerely encouraged him to contribute otherwise.
To be honest, I think Matthew was a bit sharp. In fact, this is the sharpest communication I think I’ve ever seen from him. I think it might have something to do with the ‘WTF?’ comment in the original post. We get a lot of criticism, as do all open source projects, and this particular criticism seems very well founded but could be read as disrespectful. To give the blogger credit, his update and replies seem much more constructive and respectful. And Matthew did address his points, albeit with a lot of underscores. I’d guess that Matthew and Al happened to catch each other in bad moods. If you find other posts where any ZF’er seems cross or dismissive or un-constructive, please let me know immediately. I think you’ll find by going through the ZF archives and searching for other blogs that we’ve both written and commented on that this is not characteristic at all of our communications. That said, if there is any way that we can improve on our communication with the community, we’re always looking for suggestions.

By: Paul Rouke and PRWD on User Centered Design » Blog Archive » PHP Framework Comparison: Symfony

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:39:38 +0000

[...] post is the second in a series. The first post focussed on the strengths and weaknesses of the Zend Framework. This post about another leading PHP framework, [...]

By: Rob Knight

Rob Knight — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:15:48 +0000

Thanks for the comment Wil. Regarding the documentation, I think that it's lacking in the tutorial/quickstart area, as you mention. The Quick Start tutorial seems to be the only decent example of how to build something in ZF, and it's not really a great example. It shows some of the basic mechanics of ZF apps, but it's not very engaging. It suffers greatly in comparison with Symfony's Askeet Tutorial, which is a 24-step tutorial showing how to build a complete web app. That said, ZF's reference documentation is slightly better than Symfony's. Representing class libraries in reference format is always slightly complicated by the issue of dependencies between classes (due to the need to jump between different classes to read up on related topics, which isn't so much of an issue in modular non-OO code libraries), so navigation is a bit clunky, but the documentation is good. To be honest, I've never seen reference documentation for OO systems done particularly well. The community is probably better than I give it credit for, but I'm coming from a background of having recently done some Drupal development (and I'd regard Drupal as a serious competitor to ZF for many web development tasks). The Drupal community is huge and extremely well-engaged. No PHP framework can match it, but some seem to be closer to getting that kind of community engagement than others. Perhaps it's just a question of emphasis and origin; ZF still feels more like a cathedral than a bazaar (I know, the metaphor doesn't quite fit) right now, but that may change. In an odd way, the very professional look-and-feel of the ZF site makes it feel less like a community project and more like a corporate exercise. Regarding developer attitudes, the post I linked to earlier sort-of illustrates this. OK, I admit that this isn't quite as negative as I thought it was at first glance, but the general vibe from yourself and Matthew in that thread seems to be very much "we'll implement that feature at some point in the future, maybe" and Matthew did seem a little bit offended at the criticism, but maybe I misread this. However, I do think that the best response there would have been "here's the issue for this, go contribute some code if you think that this feature is so important". The fact that you didn't feel able to say this underlines my earlier point about "letting go" of the project. It's not your job to defend the software when people are asking for extra features - it's their job to implement it (or assist others who will do so). In retrospect I may have been a little harsh in seeing this as a failing on your part though; I've just become used to a rather uncompromising attitude towards 'do it yourself' open source project management!

By: Wil Sinclair

Wil Sinclair — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:10:25 +0000

Wow. You seem to have nailed our philosophy and goals on the head. I often talk about ‘working up to simplicity’ as opposed to working down from simple use cases. We decided very early on that the only way we could provide the power and flexibility our users need with the simplicity they expect, we’d have to build on top of sound foundations while working toward the presto! application. We also realized that wasn’t all going to come together in a single release. It was a hard decision, since a lot of developers draw conclusions in the first hour of evaluating a framework, but we happen to think than many developers will find the hundreds or thousands of hours they invest in a framework somewhat more important.
Let me be 100% clear about this: Zend, with the help of our contributors, will fill in the pieces to get to a great first-hour experience over the next few releases, but we love to see frameworks built on top of ZF. There are a few I’m aware of: Xyster, Zym, and the non-FOSS (yet ) framework that the guys at tilllate.com have built. Undoubtedly there are more that I haven’t heard of or can’t remember right now. We are choosing a particular direction for project generation and manipulation that inevitably will not agree with some developers, so no one should be discouraged from creating and maintaining implementations that reflect their preferences. Of course, they can always help with ours, too. Read more about it (in the Zend_Tool proposals) here: http://framework.zend.com/wiki/display/ZFPROP/Home.
RE: Documentation. You know, this is a funny topic. Some people say it’s great, some say it’s terrible. I think our documentation appeals to certain developers and ramping up styles. Let me know any specifics of what would appeal to you. If the QuickStart helped form your poor impressions of ZF docs, I take full responsibility; I simply haven’t had the time to get back to it.
RE: Community. Honestly, I wouldn’t expect this assessment. We have about 10-15 very active community contributors. There are far more doc- and translation-oriented contributors. I also think of issue creation, ZF blogging, and even petitions to Zend to fix stuff as contributions in their own manner. I believe we’d have more major contributors if we didn’t have a relatively intensive proposal process, but we feel this process is necessary to provide the consistency and quality of ZF components. Without the quality we would simply not be meeting our goals with the framework. What changes would you make to foster a more effective FOSS-style community?
Could you please send me any links to any of our developers- including community members- that have taken criticism personally? While everyone has a bad day every now and then, we have talked about how we can make the most of any criticism. I think it’s valid to prompt the person who found the problem to also fix it; we want everyone to know that ZF is open for contributions, after all. This sentiment should always be sincere and encouraging; I will address any contributor directly if it is used to dismiss criticism. All that said, we do have a lot of users who do not contribute, and we value them as well.

I wish you the best with whichever framework you end up going with.

,Wil