Ask YC: Is Zend Framework worth learning? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Is Zend Framework worth learning?

4 pointsmatt114 comments

I started reading Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP a few days ago. The book relies heavily on the Zend Framework and Smarty templates to build a blogging website.

Does anyone else have experience with these? I'm willing to devote a lot of time learning modern web programming, but am not sure whether I'm headed in the right direction. Any advice?

Thanks in advance, Matt

View on HN

As a general rule, if you have a choice, I would recommend learning Python (Pylons or Django, I prefer Pylons for it's looser coupling) or Ruby + Rails.

While PHP is used all over the place, if you want to keep your sanity you're better off getting into more...structured systems.

Apart from that, Zend is pretty good. At my last place of employment we went through a bunch of frameworks including Code Igniter, Symfony and Cake. The various members of development all had violent disagreements over all of them. For some reason that I am still unsure about Zend seemed to ... work for us. It was stable, and nobody got into religious arguments over it's implementation. Not sure that's a good sales pitch, but it certainly didn't suck from my view. It added to PHP where it needed to, but didn't require you to learn an entirely different way of doing things. e.g. Lower barrier to entry.

solid answer, thank you.

i hadn't even considered python. what are its selling points?

It's incredibly easy to learn & use - what I've always liked about it is that I spend very little time thinking about how to accomplish a task in Python.

In addition, Python has solid support for object oriented programming which I can't really say for PHP (PHP's object 'support' is slowly improving but it's still a crappy patch). This is represented at it's core by the fact that EVERYTHING is an object - if you say:

foo = 5

foo is an object of type int. It's still loosely typed, in that you don't have to declare that foo is an int, but the contents being objects gives you a lot of power for dealing with them.

There are a lot of great tools for Python as well - Pylons (which Reddit is based upon), Django and TurboGears are pretty well entrenched and established. They are easy to learn and work with (Django has an incredibly low barrier to entry/learning curve) and powerful.

Mark Pilgrim wrote a great book called "Dive into Python" which is available for free on his website: http://diveintopython.org/

It gets things moving pretty quickly if you're looking to get a taste of what Python offers.

The other point of course is that if you learn PHP, you've only learned a tool to build websites.

Python is a pretty multipurpose tool that happens to have the ability to build web applications. (And Ruby as well)

Disclaimer: I am a noob, so take this for what it is worth.

After/during school I played in Ruby, Perl, PHP and most recently Python. I love Python and find it making sense where the other languages and frameworks seemed unnecessarily confounded at times. After a week in Python, I felt like I absorbed more than a month in any of the others (although PHP is 'easy' to pick up, its peculiarities are a bit cumbersome to work around).

After forming a fondness for Python, I decided to start on Django and love it. I am currently working on a couple of small apps based on the framework and feel the rate of progress concerning both my learning and development to be extremely rapid - far more so than was the case in reading through the various rails tutorials (just for contrast - no flaming please. I admit my complete and total ignorance in advance to any fanboys currently mumbling "idiot" as they read this).

I personally recommend checking out http://www.webmonkey.com/tutorial/Install_Django_and_Build_Y... 1st to wet your appetite - its quick and allows you to see the power of the framework in no time flat. When you finish there, head to http://www.djangobook.com and start working through - I am and am having a blast doing it.

I know it is a bit cliché, but Python + Django has been a pleasure to program in. Although I may not be able to etch out a living doing it right now, I think this is where I will be spending my recreation time for a while.

I have been using PHP for webdevelopment for 7years now and I recently started using Zend professionally and I must say it works ok from my point of view. It should be easy to learn php with it. But it has some downsides too. Like skinnging of forms for example, is not as easy as it looks! There are also still problems with the form validations. Overall it's not bad, especially because it gives you much freedom of where to put your files and things like that. But to be honest, like I mentioned before, after those 7 years of php, I suggest looking at python (django for example) too. I don't say you shouldn't learn php, it's really great, but django just seems to have it al. Don't know about scaling though...

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-...

Do most people agree that Rails is better than PHP to master?

i don't.

its too situational and dependent upon time, i feel, to be able to make a generic, blanket statement like that.

fair enough. i typed up a lengthy post, but it boils down to this: Will Rails be around for a long time?

i don't even necessarily think that it won't be around for a long time.

look at java. it'll be here for a long time to come. and it was very hot for a few years. but now its the cool, safe, standard language CS people pick up. and ruby, for rails, is the new hot language (which was virtually unknown outside of japan for many years until rails hit).

how long till rails cools down and something else picks up steam? how long until the answer to the question "i'm new, what language should i learn?" is something other than "ruby"?

on the flip side of that coin, COBOL programmers get paid a pretty penny nowadays because there are so few of them, but so many COBOL programs are still alive. how long until java programmers become the COBOL programmers of today?

whats "worth" learning depends on what you want to do and whats happening in the industry currently. imo.

As an addendum, there will always be jobs out there for writing boilerplate code.

Throwing together UI screens isn't sexy but it pays the bills so we can do things like hack code (at home) for fun

zend is a good php framework. its used more in corporate environments, from what i've seen, with cake/symfony/codeigniter being used in smaller dev groups or by freelancers.

i don't have enough experience using it to give you my thoughts on how it works and stuff, but i will tell you that for the most part, the php frameworks are all similar in how they work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com