dpc09: The day before - Dutch PHP Conference
Tomorrow (well, technically, today) the Dutch PHP conference starts. I will be attending with two of my colleagues at Zicht, Jelle-Jan and Rik. Jelle and I have registered for the Zend Framework tutorial and Rik has for the Zend Certification program.
Last year, I attended as well, and followed the Symfony tutorial day. I was a bit critical towards the presenter (sorry, Fabien, you didn't like me at all), but it was all from good will. I hope I can keep Matthew Weier-O'Phinney happier.
I have had some ZF experience lately (built about 5 sites with it in the past few months), but it has some issues. The overall design isn't that well thought-through, but it has great "off-the-shelf" features if you just want to use only a portion of the entire framework.
So, I'm a bit stuck in the middle. Some of the features are great (MVC dispatching and routing / zend form validation / filtering / response building / a great library for all kinds of purposes....) but some really need overhauling (zend form rendering, the whole "setOptions" idea in the entire library). We'll see, I'll post more tomorrow, I hope to hear some of the development plans for ZF. There is no way to keep up with your own framework anyway, so here comes the time to choose ;)
BTW, I combined Doctrine, ATK and ZF for the projects I used ZF for, into one big "best of three worlds" mashup kind of thing, where ATK will probably be the first to go obsolete. I'm really hoping plans are to let Zend_Db be such a great O/R mapper as doctrine proved to be, so O/R, forms and views will be even more easily integrated. That'll probably be ATK's downfall, and maybe Doctrine's as we know it today.