Zend Framework Complaints

 

• The MVC framework is stifling. There are other ways to handle doing separation of PHP from SQL from XHTML that are easier to manage. First, read my Smarty comment on this blog and that separates PHP from XHTML without having to use Smarty. Then, stick all your SQL as parameterized SQL inside a class file as private vars, and create a Pack() function to insert those vars when ready to get results. Also, create a database abstraction class so that you can swap that class out with another one when switching database platforms. Now, if you use ZF to just use its classes in a kind of toolbox way, it's better, but instead you could just find a framework that's already in a non-MVC way that provides these class function/method libraries.
  
• The Zend Forms API is geared for like 1990, not the modern world. In the modern world, we draw our forms the Web 2.0 style, and it's more than styling -- it's Javascript and jQuery and CSS as well to make up for what you don't get with ordinary XHTML. Zend Forms only gives you a limited set of tools and then stifles you from being able to insert XHTML into your form such as between fields. My recommendation is that you don't need Zend Forms, so don't use it.