I'm still bored and lacking posting ideas, so I figured I'd give a hyper-critical breakdown of "Four reasons to hate CakePHP" by A.J. Brown. Let's get right into it.

Before starting a project recently, I spent some time doing some research comparing CakePHP and Zend Framework for rapid development. I noticed that of the few articles out there, not many of them where able to offer any advice on using either framework for a new project. In most blogs, it seemed to come down to preference. My goal today will be to steer you away from Cake.

Granted I'm not really the target audience here, but I can keep an open mind. I can't make the same promise for my cat (coincidentally named CakePHP), who will most likely hiss and spray urine at my monitor as I read.

Cake is Heavy
Staying out of your way is a very important for many aspects in life, including your application’s third-party framework. You want something that provides functionality and structure, but allows you to fulfill your own needs in your own way.

On the same page so far. Let's see how this is a negative in respect to Cake.

There’s nothing lightweight about it. Cake tends to get in the way of your application by requiring your application to be built on top of (instead of along side of) itself.

I'm not really sure what the difference is between "on top of" and "along side of". I'm guessing this is the difference between using a framework and a library. I blame Zend for confusing this issue.

When cake is bootstrapped (configured), it will look for your application specific configuration files in a hard coded file location that it expects.

Just so I'm clear: A.J. wants a framework that "provides functionality and structure" but complains that config files are in a certain location. Isn't that part of the structure? Also, I think A.J. and I have a different definition of "heavy". This section should have been titled "Cake is Unflexibilityness."

Although you can predefine the defines (which is a whole-other reason to avoid using cake) it uses to determine paths, you’ll never be able to completely seperate cake from your life without modifying cake itself.

I don't understand why people would expect to be able to write an app using a particular framework and then be able to separate from that framework at some point in the future. Thats like switching to an unprimed canvas after painting your masterpiece on a titanium dioxide and calcium carbonate, bound with a thermo-plastic emulsion primed canvas. Who does that?

One of my cleints’ websites is was written on top of one of the Cake 1.2 alpha releases from a few months ago. (By the way, did no one tell the developers that in software engineering “alpha” release is not meant for the public?

A.J. has a point here. When an open source project releases an alpha version they should, at minimum, require a secret handshake before allowing the community to access it. Also, I remember when Cake 1.2 alpha first came out I didn't want to use it, but then Nate showed up at my house and bullied me into it.

I recently upgraded to 1.2 Release Candidate 4 and had a few problems. This is to be expected when you’re using any non-stable version of anything, but what I didn’t expect was API changes. I don’t mean additional features, I mean changing APIs. Granted they were few and far in between, but they were still unexpected.

To summarize: A.J. used an alpha release (probably against his will), jumped something like 17 releases to RC4 and was surprised by minimal API changes.

Hanging on to Old Times
The most annoying thing to me is that Cake uses PHP4 style objects. I feel safe in saying that any community software being developed today that believes hindering best practices in order to support an obsolete (in the loosest of terms) version of software is not very forward thinking. No class members or functions have access modifier, and I don’t remember seeing any type hinting whatsoever.

A somewhat legitimate complaint to those of us who've moved on to PHP5. I see this all the time and I don't think people realize that even though the framework is PHP4/PHP5, there is NOTHING preventing you from writing YOUR code in PHP5.

No Namespace Consideration
Cake uses very generic class names with no consideration for names pace[sic] collisions.

Pace is very important when dealing with rapid development frameworks. The fact that Cake has no consideration for pace leads to thousands of collisions and hundreds of deaths a year. Factor in the increased alcohol intake of CakePHP developers and you have a recipe for disaster.

By using cake, you’re forcing yourself out of using generic class names in your own application (which is a better place for generic names to be!). Want to name a class `Controller`, `App`, or `Model`? Too bad — cake has claimed those names for you!

Another somewhat legitimate complaint. I actually hit this issue once...in two+ years of using Cake...and moved past it in like 5 seconds. Here's a quick guide for some alternate names:
Controller: BossMan, Model: SheWhoWillNotLookAtMe, App: ThankGodImNotUsingJava.

Another horrible practice of Cake’s is using global functions. Hsughughugh.

I think "Hsughughugh" is an aggravated pounding of the keyboard. Which is odd since A.J. wasn't so aggravated that he didn't miss capitalizing the first word. Also check out the letter selection. Seriosly, try randoming banging at your keyboard. asdfhnasdlk. Again: k;lajsdfaksfd. Generally you get some mix of the home keys. A.J. must be using one of those crazy new ergonomic keyboards.

I cannot begin to tell you how painful and fragile this is. All it takes to cure a few of the problems this creates is to wrap them in an abstract class! I don’t know why they would rather have the function uses() in a global namespace instead of wrapping it in a class as `Cake::uses()`.

Um, this was changed like 3 releases ago.

Some (maybe most?) have been fixed in RC4 (you use `App::import()` instead of `uses()`), but they still allow the abuse by keeping the functions there.

This is just silly. He complains about something from an old version, then acknowledges it's fixed. You know what I hate about watching TV? Having to get up to change the channels. True this was fixed with the invention of the remote control, but they still left the ability to change channels on the TV itself.

Also, I'm pretty sure A.J. complained about changing API earlier in this same post. But now he wants the function removed.

Conclusion
If you are reading this article, you’re probably at a crossroads between using CakePHP or using some other suite.

Or someone who enjoys nitpicking other blogs.

I could go on and on about why I personally hate cake, but when it comes down to it, the decision is yours.

Unless Nate puts you in an armbar.

Despite my gripes, Cake is still a good tool to get a simple website up and running quickly in a structured manner, without reinventing the wheel.

CakePHP is actually against developing serious sites using the framework. They keep a running list of the offenders here.

Just make sure your website will never need to be scalable, and that its codebase will never grow beyond the small flexibility it offers.

Oh shit. Cake just got Rudy'd.

I’m personally experiencing this pain right now.

You think that's pain. Just wait until Nate puts you in a figure four leg lock and forces you to write "25 things I love about CakePHP in haiku format."

I will give credit to A.J. for breaking from the "Hate CakePHP Playbook" and not slamming the documentation. So +1 for that, +.8 for legitimated points, -138 for weak points. I give this article a 2 out of 10 (not an aggregate of the points).

Here's an FJM style breakdown of Carl McDade's well thought out and persuasive article. Haha...no really it's just flamebait crap. That was a joke. There are three more scattered through this post. See if you can find them.

A few years ago a friend of mine tried to convince me to learn ASP.NET because it was much better for my web development career than PHP.

I know this friend. Huge success. He made millions building a site where people could post pics of cats with witty captions. Now he spends his days drinking Mojitos and reading old Dilbert comics - all thanks to the power of .Net and the lifeforce of crazy cat lovers.

His feeling was that ASP.NET a.k.a ".NET professional" is a real profession that requires education and training while PHP only required a text editor. That PHP would never be taken seriously by serious companies.

I interviewed at a Microsoft Certified Serious Company once. Wasn't actually a real interview. They just called me in to make fun of my PHP experience. Then they took my lunch money and threw my backpack in a tree. I told my mom I tripped and dropped it off a bridge. Needless to say I swore of Serious Companies going forward.

Regardless of how many Facebooks and Diggs show up on the web PHP will always only be given the same importance as HTML or JavaScript.

Hands down my favorite sentence of the article. Frankly I agree with him here. PHP should be given the same importance as HTML and JavaScript. Which is to say they should all be considered very important. Obviously he was going in the other direction and even if Facebook gets drunk and hooks up with Digg and they produce a mass of FaceDigg offspring you will never change his mind.

Popularity figures from the fortune 1000's servers show that ASP.NET is the unchallenged leader of the corporate market share. Microsoft ASP.NET sites have grown by 7.9% since 2005, And ASP.NET/ASP still lead Application Server technologies.

Interesting stats. Here's my counter: How many of those Fortune 1000 sites are really just content sites describing the company and what it does and how friggen rad the management team is? When in actuality the company has a ton of other servers running apps built with PHP, Rails, Python, Perl, Java...

"ASP.net: When you really just want to work on content management systems.™"

When I take a look at all the PHP job ads and compare them to ASP.NET job ads there is something that is missing from the ASP.NET announcements. This is "must be able to show previous work." This same line or something similar is one that shows in web designer job ads, PHP, JavaScript, HTML and Flash.

Carl's brain: "Shit, I forget to trash Flash earlier. I'll just sneak it in now. Whew, that was close. Back to stoking those pissy little PHP developers."

This demand is never or seldom seen in ads for ASP.NET web developers. To me this means that employers are taking ASP.NET more seriously than PHP.

Or it means they're sick of looking at CMSs.

Unit testing, design patterns and other tools of software development cannot remove the mental label that has been placed on PHP by businesses. PHP to them is nothing more than a glorified front-end template language.

People once thought the Earth was flat. And that made it true. It wasn't until people starting believing the Earth was round that it actually became round. I'm serious. Until we can get businesses to believe in unit testing, design patters and software development tools for PHP they just won't exist. PHP developers will be stuck using WordPad as their IDE and testing their programs on lab mice.

One of the things that I have been running into of late is having spent the last three years doing only PHP. It was a mistake, one that I will not make again by doing Ruby on Rails or learning any other scripting language that does not require minimal knowledge of computer science disciplines.

Wait. I could have sworn Carl just wrote he was going to start using Ruby on Rails because PHP wasn't popular enough with the Fortune 1000 companies. Clearly I'm mistaken. Let me check that again. Nope. Shit, I'm starting to think Carl might not be the most credible resource. Not 100% sure yet. Call it a gut feeling.

I also don't recommend that anyone that is looking to start a long term career in web programming start with PHP. This is because you will be in competition for work with people that come looking for jobs with a background in Java, .NET and C language.

Now I'm completely confused. Why would Java and .NET developers be competing for PHP work? Haven't we already proven that those language are 10X more widely used and 100x more Serious®? I guess they just want the challenge of coding in a language that only has 3 functions and no support for "if" statements (coming soon in PHP6).

When it comes to development tools Visual Studio stands out from the crowd. It has a reputation that is so well ingrained into IT that mentioning it in an interview or having it on your CV quells many doubts that employers have about your knowledge.

Once I was in an interview and they asked me what program I developed in. I answered "FrontPage" and managed to keep a straight face for about 5 full seconds. Ah, that was fun.

The same is not true of PHP. Zend Studio, Net Beans, and other IDE's like Komodo are not well known outside of the geek sector of IT.

Are people really picking their application stack based on the IDE's available? Really Carl? Really?

If you are good in ASP.NET and have used any of the commercial Microsoft publishing systems like Sharepoint then you will see recruiters eyes light up.

Recruiter's eyes light up if you say once successfully installed AOL and responded to an "A/S?" post in a chat room. We're not exactly talking about a hard group to win over.

The problem with PHP is that there is no commercial PHP content management product that is popular or visible to the general audience of corporate IT workers.

Apparently he's never heard of a little product called WordPress...

While you can mention CMSs like Joomla, Wordpress or Drupal these are only known to a select group of techies and not considered to be comparable to anything on the commercial market on any level.

I will bet you the souls of one hundred hobbits (don't worry I have enough to spare) that if we polled a random group of recruiters, businesspeople, moms, recent outer world arrivals, and black plague victims resurrected from the dead, that WordPress would be far more widely known then Sharepoint and Vignette (a perl product he also mentions.)

The above reasons are why I am dusting off my C++ books and will go through some refreshers. Then later on next month I will be dropping PHP and doing only ASP.NET. Richard if you are reading this you were right and I have learned my lesson.

Hey ASP.NET, don't say we didn't warn you about Carl. In two years when he hits you in the back with a steel chair and tears off his shirt to reveal a J3EE shirt don't come crying to us.

I actually wrote this over two months ago, but never got around to publishing it. It's an account, written in real time, of my first experience with the Zend Framework.

Preface

Zend recently released the stable version of it's framework, 1.0.0 (and shortly after that 1.0.1). The company I work for is planning a long term port of their web apps to the framework, with a short term goal of integrating some of the individual components, such as zend_db and zend_cache.

I have five years of PHP experience. Originally doing almost everything procedurally, then moving to a custom framework pieced together from Smarty, Fusebox and my own database model class. Around a year and a half ago I took up CakePHP and have been using it ever since. I've done a bunch of Cake sites and although I'm comfortable with it now, I remember struggling with it at first. Part of that was the normal learning curve and part was the early version I was using.

Now that you know a bit about my background here's my first experience with the Zend Framework. I'm going in cold here. I've read a lot about the framework, but nothing really on how to use it.

7:30PM

I've got a four pack of Red Bull, the baby is in bed, and my wife is doing homework for her grad course. I have should have a few hours of uninterrupted time, so let's rock this thing. I can't wait to create some "Hello Worlds." Just try and stop me.

7:35

I went to Zend's site and downloaded the framework (http://framework.zend.com/download). I went with the zip, since I do my development on windows w/ XAMPP. The zip is 4.65MB. Cake's latest 1.2 alpha is only 634kb. That's four megs of extra goodness.

7:40

I just read the INSTALL.txt file. I'm going to re-print the entire installation section right here. You ready?

The Zend Framework requires no special installation steps. Simply get a copy of the framework and ensure that the /library directory is in your PHP include_path.

That's it.
I make a folder called zend in my xampp/htdocs and throw the whole thing in there.
I'm so excited I can't even figure out which of the 17 php.ini files that comes with XAMPP to edit.

7:50

It's /apache/bin/php.ini for anyone who cares.
My include now looks like this:

include_path = ".;C:\\Program Files\\xampp\\php\\pear\\;C:\\Program Files\\xampp\\htdocs\\zend\\library"

Booo: Pear. Yeaaah: Zend

8:00

Hmmm...I pointed my browser at the zend folder and I get a dir listing. Where the hell is index.php? There are some demos and they work, but I was expecting the Cake like welcome page.

To the docs!

8:05

The reference guide looks nice and seems pretty thorough, but I'm can't seem to find the quick start section. Off to Google.

8:10

The first result for "zend framework tutorial" is for a pre-release version. Commentators say not to use it. I guess "Because this tutorial is published online, I'll update it as the framework evolves, so that it remains relevant as long as possible." really means "the internet is for static content, when scientists invent a way to to make changes I will update this document". I shouldn't knock on Shiflet. He's a PHP superstar and kind of looks like Doogie Howser (note: The pic changed to look less Doogie like since I originally wrote this), so even if he got into a horrible PHP security related accident and lost all his programming knowledge he would still have that going for him...unless the accident scarred his face.

8:35

I'm on my second Red Bull. Somehow this one spilled into a glass of ice and vodka. Crazy how these things happen.

The comments from the Shiflet article lead me to this and this.
I'm a bit scared off by the 9 part IBM article, even though they produce some good stuff. Plus it's all dated 2006, so I'm not sure if it'll apply to the 1.0.1 release. If only there was a way to update the content of something once it was put online...if only...

The other thing that bothers me about IBM's stuff is they categorize some parts as "Articles" and others as "Tutorial". Seriously, parts 1,4,6,7,9 are articles. Parts 2,3,5,8 are tutorials. What's going on over there? I remember this causing me headaches when I was trying to find all five parts of their Cakephp artorial...or is it tuticle?

9:00

Turns out its up to you to create your own index.php, called the bootstrap file in Zend lingo. You also have to manually create the dirs for your app. Akrabat's PDF has a dir layout, but I can't tell if it's Zend required layout, Zend recommend layout or Akrabat's "this is my layout - don't question it" layout.
Either way, I'm not crazy about it. It has the everything in the webroot, then adds htaccess files to deny access. Plus the RewriteRule redirects everything to index.php, then requires another .htaccess to turn off rewrite for images/js/css.

9:30

Eh...The luster is wearing off. I'm two hours in and I haven't done any code.

9:35

I understand now why some people are calling this the Zend Component Library.

9:45

One of the things I like about Cake is that it promotes best practices. I've seen some complain that it is rigid and you have to do things the Cake way. But I don't mind because a) the Cake way is well thought out and b) it makes easy to pick up someone else's work.

9:55

I'm convinced someone could make a living buying and selling Red Bull. The price fluctuates more than the price of gold. Somedays it'll be $2 a can, $7 for a 4 pack. Other days it's $3.75 a can and $12 plus 10% of all future earnings for the four pack. Don't even get me started on the new 12oz monster cans they have now.

10:05

I can't get my brain around not putting a closing PHP tag (?>) at the end of a file. I know it doesn't "matter" and it prevents you from accidentally leaving whitespace at the end of a file and prematurely sending output to the browser.

Zend's coding guidelines even expressly prohibit the end tag:

"For files that contain only PHP code, the closing tag ("?>") is never permitted. It is not required by PHP. Not including it prevents trailing whitespace from being accidentally injected into the output."

When did this become such a problem? I think it happened to me once and I fixed it in about 3 seconds. This is the programming equivalent to peanut allergies. Who ever heard of such a thing 20 years ago (3 years in PHP's case) and now all of sudden it's more widespread than...resisting Paris Hilton joke...screw it...it's more widespread then Paris Hilton at a night vision camera convention. See I'm not above making three year old pop culture references. I should remove the link from my site to this blog before I never get another freelance job again.

10:15

If don't you think all this rambling isn't a pathetic cover while I feverishly read AK's tutorial then go ahead and keep believing that.

10:25

Ok the tutorial is nice and all, but in the end it's really just a generic CRUD app that I could generate with Cake's bake script in about 10 minutes.

Here's my favorite part:
"It shouldn’t have escaped your notice that addAction() and editAction() are very similar and
that the add and edit templates are identical. Some refactoring is in order! I’ve left it as an exercise for you, dear reader..."

So basically he's saying: "This is one way to do it, but it's not a very good way. There's a much better way and I know it. I could tell it to you and make this tutorial really kick ass, but instead I'm going to leave it to you to figure out." Thanks.

10:30

For some reason Zend has a bunch of web service classes - not that I'm against this, but it seems odd that they would be part of the core framework. Plus I'd rather have a really nice index.php/htaccess that would work on 99% of the apps. Hell I don't even know what half these services are. Lucene, Reflection, Strikeiron? These have to be sponsored right? That has to be how Zend is making money off this thing.

10:33

I've decided against doing a really boring CRUD app as my first Zend project. If they're going to include all these random web services I mine as well use one.

10:35

Lucene is "a general purpose text search engine written entirely in PHP 5". Kind of cool. RSStalker is the closest thing I have to a content heavy site, but I'm not sure Lucene would do much there. NEXT!

10:38

I have to cut back on these Red Bulls - I'm not seeing straight. Apparently Lucene and Reflection aren't services. I read "Zend_Search_Lucene" and "Zend_Server_Reflection" as "Zend_Service_..."

10:40

I was thinking of doing something with Akismet. Like a text area where people can put in anything then run it through Akismet to see how spammy it is. Kind of like a challenge to see who can produce the spammiest text. In the end I think that would be abusing a cool free service, plus it looks like they only return true/false and not a score.

10:43

Hey Zend manual team. Add a "overflow: auto;" to your pre.programming style. Otherwise your code samples look a mess if I shrink my browser.

10:46

Audioscrobbler is kind of cool. They provide a ton of interfaces to their music info. I remember like 5 years ago I wanted to do a site called onesong.com. The premise was if someone told you about a band and you wanted to find their best song to give them a try you could go to this site and find the top rated (by the users) song. Audioscrobble has a artistGetTopTracks call. I'm sure this has been done a million times by now. Still I consider this a candidate.

10:51

StrikeIron is intesesting. I'm surprised I've never heard of them. They "offer hundreds of commercial data services ("Data as a Service") such as Online Sales Tax, Currency Rates, Red Bull Open Market Prices, Stock Quotes, Geocodes, Global Address Verification, Yellow/White Pages, MapQuest Driving Directions, Dun & Bradstreet Business Credit Checks, and much, much more."

Come on. There is no way they didn't pay to be included. The "and much, much more." is such generic marketing speak. Can't you just imagine a cheesy over excited guy in a question mark suit reading that last paragraph on a late night infomerical. Anyway, StrikeIron offer some interesting choices and the first 10k requests/month are free.

10:54

I'm going with AudioScrobbler, but not the onesong thing.

A couple of weekends ago I was down in Baltimore with some friends from high school and college. We we're chatting about music at the O's/Sox game and one of my friends mentioned there was a new The Receiving End of Sirens CD. I didn't even know it was going to be released. I'm sure there are a bunch of sites that provide RSS feeds of new album releases, but you still have to scan through the list to find the bands you want. You could use Yahoo! Pipes to filter the list, but I'd rather just be able to get feeds from the bands I want.

Be back...Going to Google for 2 minutes and see if this exists.

10:57

Back. Nothing I could find. I'm going to do this RSStalker style, meaning each band gets its own feed, so if you want to track a 10 bands you'll need 10 feeds. I could have the user make an account and pick the bands they like, then generate one feed. But then I have to deal with the whole user account thing. I like this way better because someone can just unsubscribe from their aggregator and not have to remember their login to remove a band.

11:00

Hmm...it appears AudioScrobble doesn't even require an account, so I may actually be able to get his online tonight.

This is a bit worriesome: "Do not exceed one request per second to ws.audioscrobbler.com without prior
arrangement, it will result in your IP being banned."

This means I'll have to do a backend script to handle the updates, rather than just updating at the time the feed is requested. Even if I cached the feed, Bloglines requests a bunch of updates at once, so if more than one cache needs to be refreshed I could violate that policy.

Also if someone else is using the service on my shared server it could cause problems. No real way to tell this though, so I'll just hope I'm the only one (and that my shared IP isn't already banned).

11:25

Looks like the Zend docs are already out of date. "setArtist" function doesn't exist. Unless it's overloaded somewhere, but I'm getting a "Fatal error: Call to undefined method Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler::setArtist()". I guess it was replaced with the genereic "set" method. Out of curiosity I'm going to check version 1.0.0.

11:28

Nope, not there either.

11:30

Putting together the request and getting back data was pretty easy, except the list of albums is missing TREOS latest release. I guess I'm only getting "Top" albums, not all, but "The Earth Sings Mi Fa Mi" is listed as a top album on the website. A search for Metallica returns 50 hits, but the TREOS only 4, missing the latest album. Seems like the web service data isn't as complete as the website.

I plow ahead anyway.

11:35

I'm not crazy about using the term "incubator" for trial/in development projects. I feel like they're waiting to burst out the belly of their host and reek havoc on a ship full of PHP developers. And my wife said the mechanized loader suit was a waste of money. HA!

11:45

I just did a quick AppTable that extends Zend_Db_Table that catches inserts and automatically adds the created and modified dates, like Cake.

I'm not crazy about the fetch syntax:

$row = $band->fetchRow('name = "$key_name"');

Feels like I'm still writing SQL. I prefer Cake's array approach.

11:48

I also miss being able to set DEBUG to 2 and having all the SQL dumped at the bottom of the page. Zend's fetch row ($band->fetchRow('name = "$key_name"');) is returning null. It would be nice to see the query that is being run.

11:50

Yes I'm a moron. I was using ' instead of ", which means $key_name wasn't getting replaced with the actual value. I'll still argue if I could have seen the query I would have known the problem right away.

11:55

Having separate insert/update db calls is kind of annoying too. A generic save, which figures out the right syntax would be nice. AppTable to the rescue!

12:05

I'm sorry, but Zend's documentation sucks. I know Cake gets crapped on all the time for it's poor docs, but they are way better then Zend's in my opinion. Zend's docs are all style. They look nice, but once you start looking for how to do something even the simplest of things it's not there. Take http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.db.table.html#zend.db.table.insert.key-auto for example. How do I get the id of the newly inserted row? We're talking about one line of code, but in multiple paragraphs about auto-incrementing keys, sequences and natural keys they don't answer that simple question.

While I'm on the topic the API sucks too. I practically live in Cake's API. That's my home on the corner of Cache and Auth streets. The blue one with the white shutters.

Cakes API smokes Zends API - no argument. Where is the search? Where is the link bringing you right to the code? You can argue that Zend API is using phpDocumenter, so it's limited to that functionality? I think that's a poor excuse and makes me wonder how phpDocumenter skated by for so long.

Despite my grievances, this app is coming together quickly.

12:30

By the way the answer to my above rant about how to get the auto id: the return value. It's the return value.

12:40

Somewhat often the AudioScrobler service fails to respond causing an error to be thrown. Which works well until the catch block tries to do a getStatus on a non object and a fatal error occurs. Oh well I guess that's the risk you take using beta software. Whats that? Zend is production ready you say?

12:44

There's actually a band called "asdf" with a self-titled album.

SimpleXMLElement Object
(
    [name] => asdf
    [mbid] => SimpleXMLElement Object
        (
        )

    [reach] => 4
    [url] => http://www.last.fm/music/ASDF/asdf
    [image] => SimpleXMLElement Object
        (
            [large] => http://cdbaby.name/g/i/girldown.jpg
            [medium] => http://cdbaby.name/g/i/girldown.jpg
            [small] => http://cdbaby.name/g/i/girldown.jpg
        )

)

I just spent 15 minutes trying to debug why this, since I was expecting the search to not return anything.

12:50

I spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to relate tables and decided to move on. Even if I figured it out all the examples were still using two queries rather than one query with a join

1:25AM

Once I got rolling this thing actually came together pretty quickly. It probably has a bunch of bugs and I never got around to doing an update script. Because of this I'm not really comfortable putting it online. I'll probably just zip it and include the code with this post.

1:40AM

I'm officially exhausted and declaring this done. Here's the zip of the code. There is no documentation, it is thoroughly buggy and it was written in a five hour binge by someone trying to learn a framework and probably includes code that would make a seasoned Zend professional give up PHP forever and take up Java or ASP.

Epilogue - Two Months Later

Re-reading this it's clear I soured on Zend by the end. To be honest, if it was the only thing out there I would probably stick with it and eventually depend on it. I remember when I was first forcing myself to learn CSS. I hated it. I kept thinking how easy it would be to switch back to table-based layouts. But I knew it was better so I stuck with it and now can't image going back.

With Zend I'm not convinced it is better then the alternatives, namely CakePHP. It's really just a matter of preference and if Zend had gotten to me first, maybe that would be my #1. In the end it doesn't really matter. Zend, Cake, Symfony, CodeIgnitor...they're all a trabillion times better then slopped together procedural code.