ZF overview from Nick Halstead

Nick Halstead and the developers at Assembleron recently launched a new service Fav.or.it, which is an RSS reader, and allows you to comment on the posts you’re reading. Pretty smart! Tangentially, there has been something of a comment backlash from a few of the software world’s most outspoken voices this year, so I find the new offering doubly intriguing.

Fav.or.it has been developed from the ground up on the Zend Framework, so Nick has graciously provided an overview of the framework and some of the components that he used. Of particular interest to me was his view that ZF is not for beginners:

“I will at this point make lots of enemies by saying that the Framework is a professional product and is not really for the beginner. Although it has made strides towards simplifying some aspects of the MVC (and other modules) it is still certainly more complex than others and if you have no inclination to do anything ‘out of the ordinary’ then my advice is to use something else.”

I had been considering the various PHP frameworks on the criteria of convention vs. configuration, with convention being the philosophy that certain aspects of all applications are the same, so these similarities can be relied upon in framework code, whereas configuration is a philosophy that the developer is responsible for telling the framework exactly what and how logic should be executed. Convention leans towards speed, while configuration leans towards power.

ZF leverages a number of design patterns, and provides several approaches to a number of common problems, so I agree that it does take a more experienced hand to design an application with ZF. However, I also think that ZF is a great environment for practical learning about design patterns, as well as coding best practices. I hope that people who are new to PHP and/or web development find out about the framework, and sufficient learning resources are targeted at them. While ZF might not be the right choice to for your first “Hello World” code, trying to build more sophisticated tools with it will bring you up to speed with better practices very quickly.