Jackson Miller has posted a new commentary over on the CentreBlog today with a "manager's perspective" on the whole Zend Framework issue that's been so popular lately.

The (hopefully) soon-to-be-released Zend PHP Framework is something that I am watching closely. I have recently started a new position here at CentreSource as Director of Operations. In this role I will be involved in a fair amount of project management. Currently CentreSource is primarily a PHP shop. This gives me a different perspective on the Zend PHP Framework than I have seen elsewhere so I am sharing it here.

As a project manager I look forward to the consistency the framework will afford us as well as the quality I expect from a Zend supported code base. This is something PHP has needed for a long time and it has become apparent that while small groups of independent developers can create a quality PHP framework, for some reason it seems the PHP community is incapable of rallying behind a project the way the Ruby and Java communities have behind Rails and Tapestry (and others). Kudos to Zend for getting this ball rolling.

I'm not so sure that it's just that the PHP community isn't behind it (actually, I've seen a lot of support so far), I think it was the somewhat surprising way that they tossed it out there. They announced all of these collaborations with the companies (the PCP) which was fine. They announced the Eclipse plugin, which some people were really excited about. But it was the fact that the framework was just kind of tossed in there in a way that felt like an after thought. That, and some see Zend as "too close" to the language itself and wonder what kind of impact the framework will have in the future...