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. 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. 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 -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Feedback-and-questions%3A-2007-tp14531011s16154p14531011.html Sent from the Zend Framework mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
