Scott Guthrie and the Zend Framework

Scott Guthrie (who will cut you) is for the brand-new ASP.NET MVC Framework. Owing to the digitized, oral tradition of Internet-based evangelism, I have seen it in action via Jeffrey Palermo and Scott Hanselman and am very impressed. What is most important for me is that the design does not force you to use ASP.NET pages to render views. And, eventually, what is natural for me is to look for parity in the “open” world—the world of PHP. Man, did I find parity!

I am convinced that the Zend Framework is the spec’—the technical blueprint—for Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC Framework. After watching these introductory videos by Mitchell Hashimoto, I am flippantly certain that Scott Guthrie hung out with the folks at Zend as PHP support improves in IIS.

Here are my highlights showing my support for the Zend Framework:

• To use the marketing language of the Zend people, “We designed Zend Framework with simplicity in mind.” This is true for me. I am too mature of a developer to impress myself with meaningless complexity.
• I prefer this framework over, say, symfony because it is an elegant, minimalist descendant of Microsoft/IBM OOP patterns and practices (instead of being influenced by Ruby on Rails patterns). The Zend Framework, by the way, is younger than the Rails-based PHP frameworks like symfony and had the advantage of responding to these elders before its release in June 2007.
• This framework does not force you to render views exclusively in PHP. By using viewRenderer->setNoRender(true), getResponse()->setHeader() and getResponse()->setBody(), the controller can return JSON or XML—or something else (like PDF). I took a screenshot of the Bradford Cottel, Stas Malyshev webinar, “Building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) with PHP and Zend Framework,” to show this. Scott Guthrie’s ASP.NET MVC Framework does a similar thing, which is a huge change for me as .NET Web developers are no longer ‘coerced’ or ‘tricked’ into building massive, proprietary surface area into their network resources.
• IBM supports and promotes the Zend Framework. This should make IT managers—especially ones over huge Java-based shops using IBM application servers—sit up and take notice. Read “Understanding the Zend Framework, Part 1: The basics” at ibm.com.The promise here is that Zend Framework and ASP.NET MVC Framework will allow me to build in PHP and ASP.NET using overlapping concepts. Even though PHP and ASP.NET are “very different,” to me they will ‘feel’ more ‘the same’ under the MVC conceptual umbrella. This should go a long way toward reducing the IT information overload continually threatening my sanity and appealing to my corpulent American greed.

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