Frameworks, Frameworks, more than you ever wanted

While speculation is rife over Zend's new almost vapourware, I sit and wonder where it is going. What can you add to the mountains of comments that have preceded this release. I even wonder if Zend are playing their old favourite Microsoft game of hiring the competition.

Frameworks are an odd component of programming, for a change, this week slashdot published a link to a very relivant article, detailing how in some respects Graphical Development enviroments enable API writers to go crazy and create bloated libraries, which are solved by spiffy features in the editor (make you think of ZDE?). Yet dont address the fundimental issue that the API was fat and nasty to begin with.. From the quick look at Wez's post, that is one of my suspicions for the Zend framework.. but you can hardly comment on something that is not there...

Writing small clean API's is an ongoing challenge, And while PHP5 offers many new features, Having coded a few hacks in it, I begin to feel like it is persuading me to go down the bloated API route. While PHP4's object model may be regarded as a pain, defaulting to cloning objects is actually rather handy in 9 out of 10 situations..

To me a pear provides about the best you can get for frameworks, (ignoring the fact that a pageloader is not included) as it provides small re-usable components, that are in generally well looked after, and improved over time. (look at my libraries in there, some just had their 3rd birthday).

There is something about having a single source of code libraries provided and sponsered by companies (who are larger than the rest of us), smacks of the .NET/Java mess, where you spend more time reading about the obtuse class libraries, than understanding the code you are fixing.

One thing I find annoying about the justification for Zend's Framework is the IP FUD, calling a spade a spade, IP issues around libraries is not that complex.. - As long as you avoid GPL code in non GPL projects, for the most part you should be ok.. - hardly something that needs to involve 22 layers of lawyers..

At the end of the day, I guess I'm not the target audience for such a framework... - It's probably more aimed at the clueless IT department manager, who see's big names behind a library and assumes it's good, (sound like a MS/Sun strategy?) rather than letting the project architect decide on an approach and trust in their judgement....