Comments on: Zend Framework – my three month review

By: Sergi

Sergi — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:10:05 +0000

David, the problem is the speed WITH bytecode cache. By the way, does someone today not use bytecode cache from day one of any project?

By: David

David — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:29:02 +0000

I do use ZF for pretty much all my php work now. And I find its great. Gives me all the functionality I need and can do pretty much everything I want.

But as Mary said, it can be slow. But by adding a bytecode cache (I use eAccelerator), you can greatly increase the speed. I did this which a project I made. The cpu load of the 2xDual Core Xeon server i used went from 99% load on all cores to about 15-20%. A major increase in performance.

My pro tip of the day

By: Hari K T

Hari K T — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:26:07 +0000

Yes , Zend framework will rock .
Its sad that though there are many other PHP frameworks many are not using any frameworks .
Hope in the future every one will recognize the need of framework.

Thanks

Hari K T

By: Mary Nicole Hicks

Mary Nicole Hicks — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:07:51 +0000

I know this is an old post, but it is nice to have follow up comments…

It is now June 2009 and I find that I am moving away from Zend Framework (ZF). This article says that ZF is flexible and I now realise that ZF is TOO FLEXIBLE!

The problem with a flexible framework is that it requires more code to be flexible. Every call I make in ZF seems to use so much code that is not applicable to my app, but seems to exist as 1% of users may need it.

Flexibility = More Code. More Code = Slower.

By: Colleen

Colleen — Thu, 28 May 2009 22:41:41 +0000

Yes, I am in complete agreement with this and I thought this from the get-go that the flexibility comes at a cost. I am still a rank beginner after longer than three months. well OK I was seriously ill for some time so I guess I have some excuse. I would like to be swimming in this instead of wading out and getting whacked back to shore with breakers each time.

By: Matthew Weier O'Phinney

Matthew Weier O'Phinney — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 20:34:58 +0000

I’m sorry your experience was a mixed bag. This will be true in many cases when switching frameworks however, and your experience can help improve things in ZF.

I want to post a few clarifications to some of your “What I don’t like” statements however.

First, we actually don’t encourage validation in the controller; there are simply a lot of tutorials and blog posts out there that show this. We recommend putting validation close to your model, and you can do this by using Zend_Filter_Input in your model, and simply providing it with the data passed to the object. (The problem here, of course, is that we don’t have a strictly defined model — you must build your own model classes.)

Next, the same goes for Zend_Form. The actual recommendation is to build your own form class extending Zend_Form; you then simply instantiate and use it. You can use it directly in your controller, or you can attach it to your model, where it can act both as a validation/filter chain for your model as well as a form representation of the model.

Regarding verbosity, this is because we encourage a configurable architecture. Yes, $this->getRequest() is longer than $this->input, but it also allows you to inject your own request object easily, or provide some domain logic around retrieving it. This gives the developer more flexibility of implementation.

Finally, I have to agree with you: flexibility is a double edged sword here. We strive to be flexible, but clearly it comes at the cost of a steeper learning curve. We are attempting to collect best practices to follow, which should assist those learning ZF, but the process is slow.

I encourage you to contribute your ideas for improvement to the project!