Sunday, September 26, 2010

Zend is Ruining PHP

Zend (the company behind PHP)* is ruining PHP in my opinion. I will briefly outline why I think this is the case.

I recently came to this conclusion when writing a PHP Extension in C. Not only is the Zend Engine documentation nowhere to be found on the Zend website. The little bit of documentation you can find is horribly outdated. PHP in contrast to Python in regards to its internal documentation is like night and day.
If PHP Doesn't get its act together I feel it will become a stagnant language.

LACK OF CORE DEVELOPER SUPPORT:
What do core developers get from Zend... NOTHING? except maybe invites to talk at ZendCon. I haven't seen anything impressive come out of any of the employees at Zend. It would appear to me the company is simply a composed of marketing hypists.

WHAT IS ZEND DEVELOPING:
Nothing that I can tell except products to make money off of like the Zend IDE.

ZEND FRAMEWORK IS BAD:
Zend Framework provides a couple good things... Coding standards, and good organization as well as a decent Model-View-Controller setup.
It also implements "View-Scripts" which use raw PHP source code as the templating layer; although the view, and layout classes are way heavier than they need to be.
It has become bloated and reminds me of a JAVA framework in design and implementation, and is fairly slow out of the box. The first thing newcomers notice about PHP when they start using it is the huge Standard Library. (Thousands of Functions, Database API's, etc)
In the mind of a purist this is the framework. Second if you were serious about providing a standard Model-View-Controller implementation and custom 'routing' rules you should write a PHP-Extension in C instead of a framework written in PHP.

Monday, September 20, 2010

GRPUG Talk: Python, GEOS Shapely, Rtree, and Matplotlib - OH MY

Tonight I will be talking about Shapely, Matplotlib, and RTREE at Calvin College to an audience made up of the Grand Rapids Python Users Group! (GRPUG).

I will Update this blog with links to the examples used in the presentation and a copy of the presentation itself after the talk.

Update:

Here's the talk outline

You can get the example code here