Hi Federico, First, allow me to heartily thank you for these areas of feedback and questions, as they are vital contributions to Zend Framework. :)
Federico Cargnelutti wrote: > Hi, > > As I'm following more closely the development and progress of the ZF, I > would like to give the dev-team some feedback and of course, ask some > questions. > > First the feedback: > > I think ZF is relative new and the progress so far has been amazing. > ZendF has a community with very talented developers. The first > impression I got when joining the community was that web services are > one of the many priorities. I think that web services are great, they > are the future right? I'm sure that today every website uses one or more > web services. But, who is using the web services components included in > the ZF? I know that in terms of image, to associate the ZF with web > services is a good thing, but, the discussions I'm having with Technical > Managers and other Developers are always about the components that ZF > doesn't have. For example, Zend_Ftp, Zend_Form, Zend_File_Uploader, > Zend_File_Utility, Zend_Debug, Zend_Build, Zend_Image, Zend_Tree, > Zend_Nav and others that honestly I can't remember now. As Zend liaison for our web services components, I should say a few things. I, too, would be interested to hear about usage scenarios for these components. Anyone is welcome to post here or on fw-webservices if they have something to share. Components that consume web services are generally not added to Zend Framework unless they provide some significant value over having to interact with the API directly. Object-oriented XML response encapsulation, XPath queries, and other details tedious for developers to do themselves are good candidates for simplifying with a nice and simple, object-oriented PHP API. You can load the unit-tested classes in your favorite PHP editor (Zend Studio [for Eclipse], of course ;)), leverage automatic code-completion, extend the classes with custom functionality, etc. Of course, if they're not needed, they don't unnecessarily impact your ZF application and consume only a small amount of disk space, which is generally pretty cheap. Indeed, several components you mention, such as Zend_Form, Zend_File_Uploader, Zend_Build, and others are currently in the pipeline toward release. As always, it is a matter of prioritizing and the interest and abilities of community members to contribute in various areas that get a component from proposed to released. > Working as a contractor is a funny thing, you meet a lot of developers > and you have managers everywhere. So, in my case, when I'm in the > planning stage of a project, and discussing about different > technologies, architectures and frameworks, if the project requires the > use of PHP, I recommend ZF, but, if the project faces a tight deadline > (almost always), we end up using Symfony. I have used Phython/Django and > Ruby/RoR before, but the company where I'm contracting now, develops > mainly using PHP and .NET. Behind this seems to be the concept that frameworks are chosen on a mutually exclusive basis. With ZF, this need not be the case. ZF plays well with others. :) Of course, as areas are discovered where we can improve, we would very much like to (and need to) hear about them. It should be known that rapid application development concerns are definitely on the radar of the ZF community and Zend teams, and much work is happening right now in this area with respect to command line tools. We'll have more about our plans for 2008 posted soon, I'm sure. Thanks again for the feedback! Best regards, Darby > So basically, Technical Managers know they don't have 2 months to > develop the missing components, and they are asking me questions such > as, how are we going to upload and resize images? How are we going to > create a navigation system? How are we going to implement a web service > for authentication using OpenID? How does the framework cope with TDD? > Doe it have unit testing? A debugger? So far, they never asked me > anything about any of the Zend_Service_* components, except in one > project that we needed one for PayPal. > > Ok, that was my feedback based on my experience. And now the questions :) > > - What are the main objectives and golas for 2008 in regards to the ZF? > - What are the priorities and what is going to be considered top > priority in the next 6 months? > > Also, there's some confusion out there about the purpose of the ZF, some > people see it as a library of components that doesn't offer a solid > system architecture for web development, others, like myself, see it as > a solid framework with a flexible and extensible architecture. But > still, there's some confusion. > > - So, how are you planning to promote the Zend Framework next year? What > are my bosses going to read or hear about it? > - How are you going to approach new developers? > > Sorry for this massive email guys! I would like to know your opinions on > this and invite everyone to send their feedback. > > Thanks and happy 2008! > > Fed > > > >
