So let me reveal a secret. You will find much better web hosting companies, many times cheaper, in Europe than in USA. You west European guys should learn to trust the new EU members.

http://www.php5.cz
http://www.czechia.com/varianty/linuxphp5.asp
http://www.slovaknet.sk
http://www.pipni.cz/

The creator of Code Igniter has this to say about it:
http://www.codeigniter.com/forums/viewthread/187/

I think we actually have it pretty good in the PHP world vs. .net where we have different framework options including not using a framework at all.

The core system of Drupal is increasingly coming to be known as the “Drupal framework”, because it is possible to disable all of Drupal’s application-specific features, and to build a custom app on top of its extremely light core. Development is also moving towards making the core even lighter, and there is much talk of releasing the app-specific modules only in targeted distributions, rather than in the base system.

On another note, I don’t really see digging into “yet another framework” as a waste of time. Even if you don’t end up using the framework, it can be an edifying experience walking through the codebase and learning how the developers have tried to solve some of the classic application development issues. That said, of course, I guess if you have Harry’s level of experience, you’ve seen it all a few times before, and perhaps checking out a new MVC framework won’t reveal anything new.

It’s more that sense of despair I get on running into stuff like this…

Adds slashes to POST and COOKIE data in the event get_magic_quotes_gpc is disabled.

You don’t see the battle over frameworks in the C#/.NET world simply because most of the bases are already covered by the MS .NET Framework: Graphics/drawing, XML processing, web services, forms/form controllers, masterpages, templating, authentication, authorization, membership, personalization, I18N, localization, data access, logging/diagnostics/tracing, extensibility, configuration, output caching, data caching, regex’es.

MS also has a very productive Patterns & Practices group. They produce the “Enterprise Library” which can be viewed as an add-on library which takes some of the above areas even further.

The point is, faced with the completeness and quality of the official frameworks, alternative frameworks have a very hard time gaining a foothold.

On the flip side, the documentation they already have is quite good. In addition the guys behind PHP have done a bang-up job on the PHP documentation, and if we can expect something of that calibur we’ll be in good shape. And finally, the code is quite self documenting. I’ve been simply opening up a file in PHPEclipse and letting it tell me method signatures.

I get that the Zend framework will essentially be the “framework to rule them all”, however, a primary concern for me is the quality of the framework’s documentation. I don’t have a lot of faith that the Zend Framework project will produce quality documentation any time soon (maybe that’s unfair… just the feeling I get). Symfony on the other hand has some of the best documentation I’ve seen, and a great project tutorial to help you learn the diff aspects of the framework.

On another note, I don’t really see digging into “yet another framework” as a waste of time. Even if you don’t end up using the framework, it can be an edifying experience walking through the codebase and learning how the developers have tried to solve some of the classic application development issues. That said, of course, I guess if you have Harry’s level of experience, you’ve seen it all a few times before, and perhaps checking out a new MVC framework won’t reveal anything new.

Alot of the projects I build, the majority of the functionality will be contained in classes (pagination,database,validation,ajax calls, webservices), that I can compile into one DLL and then use accross many different web,command-line,XAML and windows applications.

Regardless of the language, frameworks are also great if you’re working for yourself, but remember that when you’ve pushed yourself in one direction for the last 5 years… how would that reflect when applying for a new job? Would the framework be so abstract from it’s parent language, that you may not actually be programming/solving important concepts for yourself anymore?

Futhermore, consider accountability and support or the lack of it.
Are you truely going to be able to unlock the full potential of someone else’s framework?

By all means, write your own… so far I’ve built for php and converted it for c#, wasn’t too difficult, and c# has enabled me to code for all platforms/scenarios, so this framework is allowing me to build applications alot faster than before.

I built a whole community site this month in less than 2 weeks (blog/articles/tutorials/cms/forums)

For those of us stuck on “affordable” shared hosting with no PHP5

Why still this myth?

http://nexcess.net/

At http://www.codeigniter.com/user_guide/libraries/input.html one can read

Adds slashes to POST and COOKIE data in the event get_magic_quotes_gpc is disabled.

I do not think it is such a good idea.

The stinkin’ dev of billons of code lines

Its sad that we’re probably still going to be waiting for PHP 5 adoption when PHP 6 is released :( I honestly think the only way we’ll get hosting providers to support PHP 5 is to get the packages up-to-date that the “I don’t care about PHP 5 Clan” uses. It sounds truley silly, but its the truth :) If 4 out of 5 customers at a host are using the service for Wordpress/Gallery//Coppermine/whatever, when those packages all support PHP 5 telling that 1 other customer to update his code or face problems should be less of an issue.

Perhaps I am oversimplifying, but I think the popularity and widespread adoption of some of these fantastic packages has become a bit of a double-edged sword :) And if you crack open the hood of something like Wordpress, a package that is popular despite its code and not because of it, you can see its a long, long road ahead.

BerislavLopac,

I absolutely agree with you that “a general-purpose framework cannot cover all of our needs, but will probably offer quite a lot that we’ll never use.” That’s another thing I’m liking about ZFW to be honest :)

Zend Framework isn’t all that I need and never will be. If someone else was writing all of the code I need, well… I’d soon be out of a job. But if I need new functionality, the Zend Framework gives extension points, interfaces to implement, and plenty of information on how to do it.

Zend Framework does, admittedly, offer more than I need. But the Framework has been written in such a way that it doesn’t force itself on you, and doesn’t require you to use its classes when another solution is available. Want to use PEAR::Mail instead of Zend_Mail? Fine by them… Zend Framework is lightweight and extensible, just as any good framework out to be.

Of course just because Zend is working well for me (so far), doesn’t mean that your points aren’t valid. But for me, ZFW is “just enough.” :)

As for namespaces, god yes we need them. Zend Framework “fakes them,” but someonewhat inelligantly by using long class names. I can’t wait till we get this in PHP 6!