haynesworld.net Blog

I. What I’m doing these days

At work I am having to once again delve into PHP. This time it is to create online reports that we can use to analyze service data for potential clients. Currently, the application runs within MicroSoft Access. But that really is not a long term solution (for any kind of application, really) so I am converting it to a MySQL database which we will access via PHP apps.

Yesterday I went through some PHP frameworks to see which one would be the quickest to setup. I tried both CakePHP (which I have used before) and ZendFrameworks which was recommended by Twitter user njames (thanks Nigel!). The tutorial for Cake was pretty basic but demonstrated the power of MVC development quite well. To create something more substantial, I will have to spend more time going through the developer reference documentation.

The tutorial for Zend was not as complete as the one for Cake. But that might be deceiving since Zend has quite a bit of functionality and it appears that the developers have not had time to update the tutorial. Zend also has quite a large following and as mentioned in Nigel’s blog above (jump!), might include some integration with SAP at some point.

So this morning I will return to working on Zend to get a better idea of its capabilities. Now that I have refreshed myself on the benefits of MVC, the learning process should be shorter.