One of the joys has undoubtedly getting more involved in application development again, and one of the perks is definitely the fact we use the Zend Framework so extensively. I have had experience with virtually all the major PHP MVC frameworks around from the time, the started to flourish, like CodeIgniter, Expression Engine, Symfony, CakePHP, and Seagull.

I think that it is the combination of Zend Studio, the modular design philosophy, Zend Server and now Zend Tool gives PHP the closest thing to something to a Ruby-on-Rails or Django like environment. I had previously used various components separately like, the Zend Form, and Zend ACL, yet setting up the MVC framework was a bit of a chore.

Luckily there has been major done here and getting started is much easier now. A lot of the work can be automated using the handy Zend Tool, which can generate the basic stubs and configuration for you without simple, one-line commands. If you have already planned and designed your application you could have a skeleton up and running in a matter of minutes, something that may have been time consuming and tedious vs manually doing it or with other MVC frameworks.

I think that there is a still a lot lacking but the availability of tools like these, that are very extensible give a good framework to begin with. For me, I have a java background and I thought that the fact that the coding standards and best practices really allows you to focus more on “Good Programming Practices”. Have this is important as procedures like solid coding standards, easy access to testing frameworks like PHPUnit and documentation applications like PHPDOC are essential if you are to pursue rapid development in a team environment.

One of the major drawbacks I found was the scattered documentation. The framework has a wide number of configuration options if you opt for the MVC setup, and this is both a good and a bad thing. Documentation for more basic installations id available, but it is more complex architecture and set-up that can be a bit hard to get around.

Personally I think it would be great to have a web-based interface similar to that of Django for simple CRUD and server administration. Add to the fact that the interface in Django is also highly extensible is what makes the python framework so powerful.

Maybe when the dust settles and i get done with the current project I am working on is done, I may actually try to piece something together and see how it works. Seeing as everything is set in the Bootsrap.php or application.ini config files it would be great to create “images” or snapshots to easily create new or baseline installs to play around with relative ease.