So at work I am already using the Zend Framework for my main project. I’m mostly leading the development and design of the project, but my team seems pretty into the framework so far. So point for me on choosing it as our starting point I suppose. Lately though, I have been finding myself more and more annoyed with it.

Don’t get me wrong, the code is great. They are pretty clever with their session management and their MVC approach is pretty clean, but lately the lackluster documentation is killing me. It usually isn’t enough to visit their site or run PHPDocumentor, you have to play with and maybe even dissect the LIB to figure out what your boundaries are. The time wasted is killing me here.

And for whatever reason, Zend_Cache is pretty annoying. It isn’t nearly as robust as most of the rest of the LIB, and writes its files with scores of hyphens; those hyphens seem to be the bane of my development environment here. If I hardcode a file name in for a cache file, everything is fine…if I leave it as it was, the page takes over a minute to load and doesn’t even finish writing the cache file.

I’m half tempted to rewrite pieces of the file, but it goes against my own rules in regards to editing the Zend LIB and who has the time really? The hyphens being used as delimeters in the file names aren’t even in a VAR, they are strings appended when needed ($root = $someVar . ‘—-’ . $crap . ‘—-‘;).

Marco responded to my last post saying they (Tumblr and Davidville) use mostly a homebrew framework…I think that is pretty much the same direction I’ll be moving in.