I have had to downgrade my copy of the Zend Framework to 1.7.8 after 5 mins of ‘upgrading’ to 1.8.0 to get access to all the promised goodies (Zend Tool, Zend Application, Zend Navigation, etc).
Unfortunately, Zend_Loader::registerAutoload has been deprecated and I got notices all over my screen. Considering we are working on multiple projects in Zend Framework and we all have local copies I didn’t think it was such a good idea recommending this upgrade to the team especially with deadlines looming really close.
However, I don’t think I’ll be missing any of the new additions considering the hassle involved in using them. Why must everything be so complex in ZF? I copied over the CLI tool for a test run but even that refused to run probably because I had an earlier version of the framework. I really want to love ZF (not that I have a choice, anyway) but with every new feature I think is cool comes the ‘why do I have to do all this to use it?’.
I had a look today at the Zend QuickStart to see if it had been updated to use Zend_Application and it has. However I still can’t figure out how this ‘new’ (more complex) way of setting up my application has any advantage over the ‘old’ way. I think I’ll stick with Jara. Furthermore, the ‘QuickStart’ is not really quick at all. What happened to the good old days when we built a blog in 20 mins without writing any code? Instead what we have is setting up cli tools, writing classes to initialise my app and an introduction to the Data Mapper, the most complex of Martin Fowler’s database access architectural patterns. I thought the quickstart was meant to sell the framework. This isn’t doing a very good job.
I’ll probably feel better tomorrow and get everyone to upgrade but for now I guessed I’m pissed I can’t use the new stuff. However the truth still remains that ZF is not for the ‘lazy’. To use it well you’ve got to work hard and for a RAD tool that’s an irony.
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Hello.
I am working with ZF and the project manager always is updating at the latest ZF version, but what happened? When he moved to version 1.8 had to change much code due to Zend Loader and edit menus due Zend Navigation. This had many negative consequences, because the system had to show the client and didn’t work.
Clearly the cost of the upgrade was very expensive for something that was not necessary in that moment.
Yes, I agree, to an extent. We are actually using 1.8 with our latest app (we are working on 4 related but separate apps) but we added the 1.8 files to the library folder rather than upgrade the system-wide version.