Alan Knowles has posted some of his opinions about the Zend Framework issues that have been floating around - and he's not so sure it's a good thing.

Frameworks are an odd component of programming, for a change, this week slashdot published a link to a very relivant article, detailing how in some respects Graphical Development enviroments enable API writers to go crazy and create bloated libraries, which are solved by spiffy features in the editor (make you think of ZDE?). Yet dont address the fundimental issue that the API was fat and nasty to begin with.. From the quick look at Wez's post, that is one of my suspicions for the Zend framework.. but you can hardly comment on something that is not there...

To me a pear provides about the best you can get for frameworks, re-usable components, that are in generally well looked after, and improved over time.

There is something about having a single source of code libraries provided and sponsered by companies (who are larger than the rest of us), smacks of the .NET/Java mess, where you spend more time reading about the obtuse class libraries, than understanding the code you are fixing.

He does note that maybe he's not the target audience for the Zend Framework: It's probably more aimed at the clueless IT department manager, who see's big names behind a library and assumes it's good, rather than letting the project architect decide on an approach and trust in their judgement....