Monday, March 5. 2007

BostonPHP Framework Presentations

Last Wednesday evening, I had the honor of presenting Zend Framework to BostonPHP, as part of an ongoing series they're holding on PHP frameworks; Horde was also represented as part of the evening's fare. It was the first time I've attended a UG, so I got the double whammy of that and being a presenter. Oh, make it a triple whammy -- Boston is a 3+ hour drive from the Burlington, VT area I now call home.

All in all, the presentations went quite well. It was particularly fun to see what my friend Chuck Hagenbuch has been up to with Horde; his description and demonstration of RDO, or "Rampage Data Objects" was very cool (I really like the idea of "Horde on the Rampage" -- it's a very funny image for me), as was his working demonstration of using WebDAV to pull results via PHP in the Mac Finder.

A lot of people are interested in and working regularly with Zend Framework, at least based on the questions I was receiving. Attendees ranged from the "what does Zend do" category to the "We're standardizing on Zend Framework and use Zend products throughout our stack" category. The bulk of the comments I received were either of the flavor "I really like what I'm seeing" or wondering how mature/stable Zend_Db is. Unfortunately, at the time I was preparing the slides, there were many features in Zend_Db that can cause headaches, and I took some time to point these out; however most of these are soon to be history, due to the work of Bill Karwin and Simon Mundy, who are pushing to get a stable, usable DB abstraction layer out the door for ZF 1.0.

During the joint question and answer session, I started getting some particularly tough, pointed questions from one member of the group. I wasn't getting particularly rattled, but the moderator, Seth, decided to intervene and introduce me to my interlocutor -- none other than Nate Abele of the CakePHP project. In the end, he joined Chuck and myself at the front of the room, and we had a nice panel discussing how the various frameworks handle different issues.

If you're ever in the Boston area, check to see if BostonPHP is having a meeting; it's a fun group.

My slides are now available; I've revised them slightly to fix some syntactical errors I noticed during the presentation, but otherwise they're what I presented. You may also want to check out the podcast.

Posted by Matthew Weier O'Phinney in PHP at 23:52 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

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Hi Matthew,

Thanks again for visiting us in Boston, I personally really enjoyed the show. I've been a very outspoken critic of the Zend Framework and the approach which the "powers that be" have taken in developing it (hence the pointed questions, thanks for being a good sport ;-)).

However, the views that you presented helped to clarify some of the reasons why things are as they are within the project, and I can certainly empathize with some of the issues you've had in pushing things forward.

I still have my reservations about the underlying philosophies of the framework, but at the end of the day, the project itself can only serve to elevate the level of discourse (and code) within the PHP community, which, I think, is the whole point.
#1 Nate Abele (Link) on 2007-03-06 22:39 (Reply)
Nate -- sorry I've taken so long to respond; evidently my notifications of comments aren't getting sent out!

It was a pleasure to present last month, and I particularly enjoyed the interchange between myself, Chuck, and you. I am keenly aware of much of the criticism of Zend Framework, and I'm glad that the presentation helped clarify some issues for you, as well as raise some important points of discussion.

BTW, recent releases of ZF have incorporated some of the feedback you and others at BostonPHP raised. :-)
#1.1 Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Link) on 2007-04-02 08:25 (Reply)
I can't read slides with the pdf file you provide. I am on Win XP SP2 + Firefox 2 + Adobe Acrobat reader 8

Thanks.
#2 arnoweb on 2007-07-24 10:30 (Reply)
I can. I am on a chair.
And it is nice! I mean the pdf, not the chair. Last one is an oridinary office chair, cannot sleep on it.
Thanks for the presentation, I have found it very useful!
#3 Pernahajder Kembel on 2007-11-14 11:47 (Reply)
Would it be possible to see the code for Phly_Db_Table_Generic? The presentation seems rather unusable without it :-)
#4 Robin on 2008-04-14 16:04 (Reply)
Unfortunately, not at this point. There were significant changes in Zend_Db_Table between the time I presented this and the 1.0 ZF release which make it unusable. (Please note, this presentation was over 1 year ago.) I may revisit this, and if I do, I'll post the code.
#4.1 Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Link) on 2008-04-14 16:24 (Reply)
Well, any hints on how you were solve getting instances, etc would help.

I can mail you privately if you don't want to publish it due to the fact it doesn't work :-)
#4.1.1 Robin on 2008-04-14 16:46 (Reply)

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