It has finally happened: the first release candidate of the Zend Framework is out.
To get this out of the way: there is little that is new. But the focus was on fixing bugs and, to a large extent, stabilizing the database components.
And that has succeeded. The database components now work with fewer "side effects." I tested them with Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Oracle 10i, MySQL 4.x and MySQL 5.x.
You can use the same API almost throughout. Apart from a few problems with Oracle sequences in conjunction with the Zend_Db_Table component, programming with ZF is wonderfully easy.
Another important point for larger projects is that table metadata can now be cached with Zend_Cache. This speeds up large applications with lots of accesses tremendously.
I am still missing the Zend_Form component. But the many different preferences are what is holding back progress on the form component. What PHP programmer has not already written one form abstraction or another?
Another new feature is that you can now do more than just read news feeds. A news feed can now also be created using an array structure.
Here I would have liked a solution involving DomDocument.
That is all for now. I hope to be able to report more about ZF soon.
Hopefully in version 1.0 by then.