Zend Framework

I've been hearing a lot about Zend Framework over the past year or two, it seemed to have become the de facto standard framework (something else I've been hearing a lot about) and I felt a need to get up to speed on it.

I put up my review of my review of Easy PHP Websites with the Zend Framework. I bought the book a few months back, as it seemed the best of the choices at the time. Quick summary of the review: Okay book, not impressed by Zend Framework, last third of the book is useful and interesting.

I'll talk about not being impressed by the DB part of Zend below, but I feel the main other aspect that bothered me was the way data is given to and then used in views. In the controller I have to write:
$this->view->something=$mymodel->get_something();

Then in the view it is used as:
Our something is <?php echo $this->something;?> today!

All that $this-ing and view-ing makes the code verbose, hiding the real thing I'm trying to say with my code. In particular the view code is ugly - ZF has not helped at all compared to writing plain PHP.

Why do I care? Try getting a designer to edit a view that looks like that. They may be comfortable with HTML but will go pale and faint at the sight of a dollar sign let alone all the surrounding junk. I can tell you from experience they will refuse to even edit a file that contains text that looks like that, let alone type it themselves.

I was also not impressed with how Zend Form does input validation. It seems to be just as much work as doing it in plain PHP. If I add a dependency I want value for money!

Back to databases. I recently wrote about being impressed with Doctrine ORM. Zend DB didn't impress me at all; I already use Pear::DB to abstract away the database, and all Zend adds is having to use PHP instead of SQL to write common queries, while still having to use SQL to write the less common ones.

A web search found I wasn't alone in this opinion, but what was interesting was I found people using Doctrine within Zend Framework, as a replacement for Zend DB.

To quote an article by Ruben Vermeersch: "While Zend_Db isn't a bad technology, it is still quite low-level and close to the underlying database. Using Doctrine, you can manipulate your data like objects, without worrying about the database too much." The article is pro-Zend and pro-Doctrine, and shows how to use the two together. Good clear article.

Here is another example of using Zend and Doctrine together. It is just example code, not a teaching article, but interesting as it also uses ajax (using jquery).

Here is an article comparing Symfony (using Doctrine) with Zend, with a pro-Symfony slant. Also check out the comments, especially the reply by Matthew Weier O'Phinney describing what is coming up in Zend (including how it may have more formal integration with Doctrine at some point, and hopefully auto-admin pages and auto-forms-from-schema).

By the way, the afore-mentioned Ruben Vermeersch article suggests these articles to get up to speed on Zend:
http://framework.zend.com/docs/quickstart
http://akrabat.com/zend-framework-tutorial/

I'd like to stress again that my views of Zend Framework are currently only based on studying it; I'll get back to you once I've tried it out on a full-scale real-world project.