Smallunch - Framework for Zend Framework
I am in the process of starting a new software project, and I did much research on which technologies to choose from. There is a large community component to my project, and this software will be used by people globally. Because of this, as well as other factors such as cost of developers, availability of developers globally, ease of learning, speed of development, stability of platform, etc., I chose PHP over Ruby, Java, and Python.
Rather than starting from scratch, I set out to choose a framework in which to build my project. I fairly quickly chose Zend Framework, because of its elegant MVC architecture and the fact that its codebase that does not need to be backwards compatible to PHP4. Also, my friends at Magento have proven that ZF can scale, and become the base of a rapid development platform.
As I started using ZF, it was obvious that it was built to adapt to a number of architectures, styles, layouts, etc. While I was able to code their Quickstart application fairly easily, it was difficult to try to piece together a more substantial example, including user management, ACL’s, layouts, etc. Surely this stuff is needed by almost everyone!
So, I decided to look for the ZF module library, akin to Wordpress plugins. It is unbelievable that there is not a library of open source ZF modules to choose from! I am talking about modules, not ZendX libraries. Where is an admin module? What about a module which allows Facebook Connect to ‘just work’ when it is put in the modules directory? How about other OAuth modules? Do you really expect me to hand code all of my database objects? What about a library of themes?
What is missing is an introductory framework built on top of ZF, with all of this stuff included. I searched for quite a while, and finally came upon Smallunch, a project which fills in all of the holes left open by ZF.
Smallunch was built by Jeremy Moore, and he uses the framework for his own projects. Jeremy told me that I was the first to find it outside of his circle of friends. It certainly looks more mature than this at first glance.
I plan to contribute to this framework as I build out functionality for my own project. However, I know that this project is going to be well used once people find out about it.
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