Zend PHP Framework Announced

I somehow missed Zend's announcement the other day that it will publish an open source framework for PHP. The overview page mentions "extreme simplicity" in three different places. It will interesting to see how this will turn out when it arrives, but I haven't been able to find much in the way of details yet.

My standards are pretty high. I don't much like J2EE. I modeled DataCrux/DataCruxWeb in the Cocoa mindset, and Rails does much of the same. Hopefully the Zend framework will veer towards the dynamic side of things, though this is somewhat limited by PHP itself.

I've been working with Ruby quite a bit over the past week or so, and I like it. Its dynamic nature puts it head and shoulders above Java in my book, and at least into the the same neighborhood as Objective-C. Rails leverages all of this and makes clever use of named hashes to mimmic Objective-C's named parameters.

I also like how Ruby goes above and beyond the call of duty to eliminate "syntax noise" and redundancy. Rails matches that by eliminating the "implementation noise," generalizing a good chunk of important code. Between the two, you have a pretty good environment.

That said, The Zend framework could end up being a major presence. There's a sea of PHP developers out there, but shockingly few use any sort of application framework. It's good that Zend realizes that a formal framework will be ignored if the API is too difficult.

It's also interesting how the framework overview page calls out Rails by name -- a validation of its momentum.

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