Hi all, Short story:
Thank you to everyone involved in the Zend Framework. You have re-ignited my interest in developing PHP applications and helped me learn a hell of a lot in the process :) Long story: As a self-taught developer, I started many years ago with a BBS system called Proboard. Proboard had a C SDK that allowed you to write add-ons (PEX) which where essentially executables that would run within Proboard and give access to the BBS's functions. After that, I wrote add-ons for various other programs / scripts until a couple of years ago when I started writing modifications for the vBulletin forum software. After about a year and a half I became disillusioned with the slow progress of vBulletin and decided to cast out and start writing fresh new PHP applications, rather than writing modifications for pre-built scripts and applications. It then became painfully obvious to me that writing complete PHP scripts was exceptionally hard. With Proboard / vBulletin / etc, all of the core bits where taken care of. For example, connection to databases, handling input filtering, and so on. After writing all of these methods / libraries from scratch I decided that perhaps PHP development wasn't for me. At this point, I decided to branch out in to Windows programming and played about with Visual C# for about 6 months until that one glorious day I accidentally discovered the Zend Framework. Without realising it, I had essentially been using frameworks all of my programming life in one form or another, be it the Probard SDK or extending vBulletin. To discover a nice, easy to use Framework for my favourite programming language (Yes, PHP :D) was incredible. Since I've started investigating / playing with the Zend Framework a month or 2 ago, I feel that I have learnt so much about PHP, OOP and software development as a whole. It has really opened my eyes to the possibilities that software development has to offer when done right. Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone involved in the Zend Framework project, and that I'm looking forward to v1.0 and the great new features that are bound to follow. Keep up the great work all! Kind regards, Alan.
