Zend Framework Webcast
After the Zend Framework Webcast, hosted by php|architect, many PHP expert involved or not in the project have reacted and added comments and thoughts about it. Chris Shiflett, expert in PHP security, posted notes and an overview figure of the framework.
The core focus of the framework is Extreme Simplicity. In order to achieve this, it must be very easy to use. This doesn't just mean that it must be simple to write code - it also needs to be useful in existing PHP environments without the need for external libraries or custom modifications. In many cases, this means that features must be implemented in pure PHP, so that they're available everywhere. For example, the search component is a pure PHP implementation of Lucene, and the front controller doesn't rely on a sophisticated collection of mod_rewrite rules.
Three components were demonstrated with use cases in this webcast which are the ZActiveRecord, ZMail, and ZSearch. You may check Chris post for further details and code snippets, which demonstrate the simplicity that have been implemented in the Zend framework.
Chris Cornutt, the guy behind phpdeveloper.org, have an interesting post also and notes about the Zend Framework and about the session in general. Chris pointed to some example of components that will be available in the Zend framework :
- Frontend - Ajax, forms, etc
- Data - ActiveRecord, InputFiltering
- Syndication - RSS, Atom
- Web Services - REST, SOAP, XMLRPC
- User - Auth, Session
- Documentation - phpDoc, Manual
This brings us to the next stage - the components themselves. Each of the components are developed by a team of individuals, no single developer/small teams here. Cross-company development is also encouraged. All of the components come out of proposals that are written up and “well reviewed” before they’re ever even talked about as far as inclusion. As mentioned before, all of the code for them is brand new stuff, not pulled from outside sources and is subjected to a good real-life testing before it’s finally approved.
This remind me the PEAR project and an article I've written yesterday about the PEAR project, its a set of components too, but too difficult to join in one framework. The organization of the development is very important and its a major key to the success of the project, in addition to the idea of cross-companies development which is not very common.
This webcast gived us certainly more informations and technical details about the architecture of the Zend Framework. There is no release date yet, but the project is promising and many are awaiting to see the progress and the result of this great work.
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