UK PHP Conference

The UK PHP Conference is a one day event on the 29th February 2008 and I’m speaking with Toby Beresford and Ian Christian about three PHP frameworks: Zend Framework, Symfony and CodeIgniter. You should go!

There’s a lot of great talks and I’m slightly miffed that I’m going to miss Zoe’s talk on testing PHP, so I really hope that the someone takes notes for me ;)

The general plan is that we discuss each of the three frameworks in turn and then have a Q&A round-table type thing where we can compare and contrast the frameworks together. Obviously I’m talking about the Zend Framework and I want to talk about the key features about the Framework.

I’m not a “them vs us” type of person and so I’m not into bashing other frameworks, especially as I think that using any framework improves the productivity of most developers. However I do want to help emphasize the features of ZF that make it different.

One thing about the Zend Framework is that its scope is vast!

I thought, I’d start by brainstorming about which feature was the one that made you decide to investigate it more? For me, it was actually Zend_Search_Lucene that piqued my interest. I was struggling sorting out a better search system for one of our clients when I first heard about the Zend Framework, so it hit home that maybe that would be a better solution going forward. Since then, I’m now enamoured by the MVC system’s flexibility. Whenever I’ve needed to change something, I’ve found that there’s a flex point where I need it. Now that we are using the Framework in production sites, we’re finding the other features useful too.

So… what you think I need to cover to help people understand the strengths and weaknesses of ZF?

Posted by Rob on 23rd January 2008 under News | 7 Comments »

7 Responses to “UK PHP Conference”

  1. FX Poster responded on 23 Jan 2008 at 10:54 pm #

    Code Ignitor Maybe, “CodeIgniter”? :)

  2. Ted responded on 24 Jan 2008 at 3:52 am #

    Wow, thanks for that insight. As if anyone reading a PHP blog about frameworks wouldn’t know what he meant. Anyway, he’s using the proper English spelling, not the American hacked up version.

  3. Fred responded on 24 Jan 2008 at 6:05 am #

    Hmmm. Are you saying you don’t like the Zend Framework’s MVC system? Should we think twice about using it?

  4. Rob responded on 24 Jan 2008 at 8:12 am #

    Hi FX Poster,

    I keep forgetting that CodeIgniter is misspelt :)

    I’ve now updated!

    Regards,

    Rob…

  5. Rob responded on 24 Jan 2008 at 8:14 am #

    Hi Fred,

    Clearly yesterday was “typo day”! Thanks for the heads-up.

    Next time I won’t blog whilst watching Torchwood :)

    Regards,

    Rob…

  6. Dan responded on 25 Jan 2008 at 3:27 am #

    Rob,

    Hope all is well and thanks for stopping by my blog! I would love to go to the PHP conference in London. Have fun!

    I convinced the last company I contracted with that they needed to do away with their (poorly) homemade MVC framework and move to a more robust and widely developed framework. I went through an evaluation period on my own, and found that Zend Framework, CakePHP, CodeIgnitor, and Symfony were the forerunners. Based on my review, I subsequently recommended the Zend Framework.

    My reasoning included Zend being “the PHP people” and the presumption that the PHP community of developers would likely get on board with the ZF and that help, in the form of community support as well as availability of developers, would be more plentiful. Once I started exploring the ZF, I was even more convinced by the great classes I found within it.

    I did notice, however, was that a good number of people were using the CakePHP framework. Another developer I was working with at the time also did some evaluations and decided he too liked Cake, citing easier setup and good documentation as reasons. I see that Cake is not included in your comparisons. Is there any particular reason for this? Do you have any personal experience with Cake or what have you heard about it? Just interested in your input…

    Thanks, Dan

  7. Rob responded on 26 Jan 2008 at 10:32 am #

    Hi Dan,

    Thanks for the comment!

    Cake’s not in this post as there isn’t a speaker at conference for them. I have to admit that I don’t know much about it as when I first looked at it, it was targeting PHP4 and PHP5 and I have no interest in PHP4-limited code.

    Regards,

    Rob…