I've been reading about these great new 'frameworks' for PHP development.
The most similar experience I have so far is using PEAR/Smarty in
application development.
I am becoming very interested in adding one (or more) of these frameworks
to my work existence.
I'm leaning toward the Zend Framework for the following reasons:
1. Zend's commitment to PHP in the enterprise environment
2. I'm studying for Zend PHP certification...so remaining within the same
family sort of makes sense.
3. It's widely heralded as a very good 'framework'
4. Integration with my IDE, Zend Studio
5. Great support/userbase/forums/docs
I'm getting ready to start a new project that is going to be somewhat of a
stretch for me. It'll be probably the most complex project I've done where
I'm the only designer/developer and have to do everything myself: from func
spec to mockups to wireframes to database design to documentation to code
to maintenance...all of it is me.
What do you think, should I kill 2 birds with one stone and use the ZF to
build this new project? Or would it slow me down to add 'learning the ins
and outs of a new way of working' to my already long list of tasks and
short time to complete them?
Zend touts this thing as 'saving time' and 'letting you work more
efficiently'. Will the new developer who is learning how to use ZF realize
those efficiencies or are they only for the people who are quite
experienced with the framework?
I'm curious about whether it's practical to begin with a framework by using
it on a real, production project.
??
John Corry
