Like most Web developers, I’ve become enamored with the myriad Web frameworks popping up everywhere. Symfony is very cool, as is Cake. But the Zend Framework offers a particularly compelling component that I couldn’t resist using for a recent personal project involving aggregating Amazon sales rank information for Apress’ open source line (of course we’ve long aggregated such statistics, but I wanted to recreate my own solution for kicks).
My latest SearchOpenSource tutorial describes this project, showing you how to take advantage of the Zend Framework to create your own aggregator. While it’s not an introduction to the framework, you should nonetheless be able to follow along fairly well provided you’ve some understanding of how MVC works.
Jul 21, 01:04 am
Or if you want to try a PHP framework that makes web development rediculously easy, try CodeIgniter. The framework comes from the developers of ExpressionEngine and has been popular for people that are learning PHP or beginning to learn the idea of frameworks.
Cake, Symphony, and the Zend framework are great, but they take some time to get to the point of programming. The Zend framework also is not quite to the point of readiness for production use.
The Amazon component is just a library, and that component could be created for any of the other frameworks. The real money lies in the design of the framework.