Zend/Zend tutorial review

Zend

Zend seems to be a pretty good framework, as one would expect. From what I have seen, most of the code seems clean and logical. It has useful built in scripts to call to set up basic files. Seeing as developers are lazy, it's nice to have code to write your code for you.

There are some things that I'm not keen on. It seems to be that forms seem to post the data back to the same page, which means if you try and go back in the browser, or refresh the page you get that annoying 'are you sure you want to submit this data again' pop-up.

Models are set up in a very similar way to how I've been taught to safely set up object with functions to call and set properties rather than setting the variables directly (this avoids accidental assignment).

Zend Tutorial

The tutorial was pretty good at helping me understand the basics of MVC.

That's about all the good I have to say about it.

The tutorial wasn't very well written and basically was just a load of code to cut and paste into your application. The 'Create a Model page' was particularly confusing by getting users to create a script to populate the database with sample data when it could have halved the size of the tutorial by just giving the SQL to create the records.

I know nothing extra about the Front Controller pattern as all the code dealing with that seems to be hidden in the Zend source code. I realise the tutorial makes no promises about this, but I was disappointed nonetheless.