Zend Framework 1.0
Andi Gutman reports that Zend Framework 1.0 was released to day. While I really like their approach to a Framework (take only what you need and ignore the rest), not having a good tutorial is really hurting them. An in depth reference guide just does not cut it in the Google age. A few months back, we started on a new project at work, and we had to decide between using a MVC framework or writing our own framework, so I downloaded several to try out. Zend was one of the one of the toughest to get up and running from scratch, purely because of the lack of some type of quick start guide or tutorial. When evaluating a framework, I don’t want to spend several days learning the ins and outs of how everything works, I just want to get the basic feel of it in a matter of hours.
For the curious, I ended up recommending CakePHP for the project. In the end, however, I was voted down in favor of simply throwing our hodgepodge of code together. Welcome to 2008 people. Even getting my coworkers to use a template engine like Smarty was like pulling teeth. Two months in, I think they are finally starting to understand the benefits of well structured code, at least I can sleep knowing I’m doing some good around here.