It takes time to get things right; I for one would rather wait a little bit for something good.

On the the framework preview; it’s late, but it’s not due to lack of effort. Everyone is working hard on making the preview the best it can be. While I understand that you’re eager to get your hands on the framework, I think you’re over exaggerating things by calling this a “broken promise”, and I think your comments cast the efforts of the people working on the framework in a bad light. Don’t forget that it’s developed by a coalition of different companies, not just Zend. It’s hard enough to coordinate development time within a single organization, let alone between the better part of 20 different entities.

However, I am curious how you are defining ‘users’ here. I think we would both agree that frameworks and other developer tools are of not much concern to the end users. I assume you are talking about the developers who are using the tools. I would argue that when talking about enterprise applications the ‘user’ of the language / framework is the company, not the developer. Standards bring flexibility and easy integration to the companies who are thinking in terms of developers for their team and the costs associated with those. IT departments and projects are expensive and you want to make smart investments.

I believe in what Zend is trying to do. They are just going to have to work with me here ;)

You have already some standardizatoin, the success of the pear installer could help in this area too (preventing conflicts, std install tree, common versioning). The API standardization in PHP is a myth, except for a very limited amount of tasks, common sense always wins here.

If there is a really a need, I seriously doubt that the Zend framework will ever bring it to reality. I do not mean that their framework will be bad, only that Zend is not really in a position to take over the “market” with a fresh new framework.

I think that all these frameworks do not bring what most of the users need, flexibility, easy integration. The components based tools are more reasonnable and follow the PHP way, like PEAR (the oldest components library) or ezComponent. It gives you the choices.

Why is there a need for standardization? There are a bazillion ways to do things in PHP. When we write a big app for a client, it is written well, but it is the way we do things. If any developer comes along behind us there is a period of time that they have to spend to ramp up on the way that we do things. The same is true for when we take over an application that another developer has written. We have no option but to pass at least some of the costs to ramp up on the the client. However, when we take over a Ruby on Rails project we already know how it works. We can just dive in and start solving business problems. The same hold true for .NET. Personally I would much rather take over a Ruby on Rails project over a PHP one.

We will gladly accept PHP work as long as there is a market for it. The Zend Framework has a lot of promise, and it will add directly to the bottom line of the businesses who are adopting PHP as long as it is able to gain some acceptance. Just like the Zend Certification will help companies hire PHP developers, proficiency in the Zend Framework will also be a differentiator for developers. However, if Zend continues to over promise and under deliver then the chances will begin to diminish.

About enterprises application, do you suggest that without Zend nothing happens in the enterprise? Please check the other frameworks and other components. Zend is only planing to provide yet another killer framework, like the 20 last frameworks developed for php.