I’ve been using the Zend Framework to recode a large website and I’ve generally been very pleased with the results and ease of use. I’ve found that using the framework has significantly decreased my development time and really just given me cleaner, easier to maintain code. Of course, these are the goals of any framework. I do have a couple of issues I’ve come across and it is those I’d like to talk about.

As a disclaimer, I do realize that the Zend Framework is still in beta and is still apt to change. That’s one of my goals with this post…to help bring about change in a couple areas I see need it.

The first annoyance I came across was that I am unable to use Zend_Db_Table with some of my tables because I don’t have a single column primary key. I don’t want to engage in debate here on whether or not a primary key should include multiple columns. That’s not the point. Personally I believe there are are valid uses, but again that’s not the point :). The point is that there are people with tables that have multi-column primary keys and Zend_Db_Table should work with those tables. In my situation I’ve had to resort to either altering the table and adding a autoincrementing primary key or just issuing direct SQL queries. I’d prefer to leave my table definition alone and utilize Zend_Db_Table throughout my application rather than a mixture of SQL access methods.

The second annoyance I’ve seen is that I can’t set unique lifetimes for different Zend_Cache objects. This is a serious, serious issue that needs to be addressed. Just about any application that caches multiple objects can benefit from different lifetimes. I’ve had to resort to checking the filetime on the cache file and manually expiring it. That’s an ugly hack that I would rather not do.

Those are really my only two complaints at this point. I’d love a tighter integration of the Model, but I can live with the way it is implemented now. I’ve enforced on myself some strict rules for dealing with the Model and I can deal with that. So, my hats of to the development team! Keep up the good work!