I have been following the Social Network Portability(SNP) group setup at Google. The conversation there has been lively and dynamic at times. But the conversation always seems to boil down to the need for a centralized approach to managing friends. I just don’t see where that is much different than using Facebook. And why is it everyone is always trying to reinvent the wheel? Create their own “unique” protocol or data format.

Henry Story from Sun Microsystems chimed in yesterday with a fantastically detailed dialog on the whole social graph or SNP problem. What I found really interesting about the whole post is that he never attempts to develop a new standard, format, or protocol.

Henry dives right into the elephant in the room, security. Stating the obvious: “Not everyone lives in the open the same way” He is the first one to make me understand the beauty of the mbox_sha1sum. Then he goes on to give an example of providing different foaf’s based on the amount of trust you assign to each person.

This was a fantastic read and I highly recommend it.

Trying to find that one ring to rule them all seems to run counter to the whole reason this conversation is happening. It’s time to turn the conversation to a truly open system, much in the way DNS or even OpenID is.

Having read 0xDECAFBAD’s post on the PHP framework CodeIgniter, I got excited to try it out for myself. I have been examining every PHP framework I can find and, frankly, they all suck. Then I turned to Ruby-On-Rails. It was love at first sight. Beauty, elegance and style in a programming language and framework, total harmony.

Then it hit me that I would need to learn an entirely new programming language while still supporting all of my clients on PHP, reconfigure servers, and learn the Rails migration strategy. Seems like a nice challenge for the long haul, but I have short term needs that this just wasn’t going to fill.

Thats when I met CodeIgniter. Straight forward. Will work in both my PHP4 and PHP5 environments. The documentation is to die for and digging in to code took the watching of two webcasts and a quick jaunt through the documentation. It uses a nice MVC structure and has a good depth of built in (did I mention these guys document their code) functions ready to handle most common everyday tasks.

Moving to any framework is a challenge, but relearning an entire language to standardize things is rough approach. Throw in the fact that the documentation of most of the other packages is obscure in either clarity or existence makes the task down right daunting. Throw in the fact that, like nearly everyone else we are just beginning to migrate to PHP5, I need something that will hang with us while both feet are on either side of the line.

I can’t say it’s a perfect framework, I have only been using it for less than a day, but I can say that it beats the others I have played with. I will let you know how it goes.

I have had a busy week, hence the reason posting is down. In what little spare time I have had, I have begun playing with Zend Framework.

If you are familiar with Ruby-On-Rails, then Zend Framework will seem vaguely familiar. The release of a production version of Zend Framework on July 2, 2007 got me interested in taking it seriously. So I downloaded a copy, attended the introduction webinar and started coding.

If you are like me, reading endless hours of class documentation is only helpful once you understand the basics of the product so I started searching for some overview tutorials. This is where the infancy of the effort begins to hit you. Yes, there are a number of tutorials and overviews, but you will varying degrees of success with them because the released version and the documented versions may not coincide. Aside from the webinar, I found two tutorials the most helpful: Zend_Controller Quick Start and Getting Started with the Zend Framework. Neither of these tutorials worked for me as written. I am still playing with it to determine if it is my specific install or their version of Zend Framework and mine are slightly different. But with a little modification of the instructions you can be up and running quickly.

If you have had a taste of Ruby-On-Rails you will find that the Zend Framework is like an infant sibling. I see the potential from the Zend Framework when it grows up, but right now its like a child with no expectations of it. By that I mean, they suggest a directory structure, but don’t expect one. They expect an MVC paradigm, but it will function just as well without it.

Another thing you will find missing is tools to make routine tasks easier, like a generate script to generate and stub out your controllers or views. It’s this lack of polish that makes me wonder if it is ready of prime time. And don’t get me started on object oriented PHP which lacks the real elegance of Ruby.

All-in-all I am please with what they have done so far and eagerly await the polish that is sure to come. If you are like me and switching your entire company from PHP to Ruby-On_Rails is a task that seems virtually insurmountable the Zend Framework is a very good alternative.

Tags: Zend Framework | PHP | Ruby-On-Rails

I have looked at dozens of PHP frameworks. They all have one thing in common…they lack the finesse of Ruby-On-Rails. But, since I am a PHP programmer and PHP is one of the most popular web programming languages, I need to find one that is going to work.

If you need a reason to use a framework, the best one I can come up with is consistency. The coding style is documented, the calls are standard and consistent. It automatically puts a group of programmers that come from disparate backgrounds together speaking a common language.

So which framework do I pick? There is really only one worth looking at, that is the Zend framework. Here’s my reasoning. It’s tightly coupled with PHP, hey it’s made by Zend. That is another reason…it’s made by the folks at Zend. This means it will be around for a while and someone is being paid to make it successful. And most, importantly, enterprises will adopt it because now they have someone to blame if something goes wrong.

Like it or not that gives the Zend Framework a leg up on the competition. It wouldn’t surprise me to see it shipping as a standard in upcoming releases of PHP much like the PEAR libraries are today.

But I don’t want to seem like I am closed minded about this. Feel free to comment on why some other framework is a better choice.