Is Zend Framework a total waste of my time?
- by Citizen
Ok, I'm about 50% done with the "30 minute" quickstart guide from Zend.
I must be missing something, because this seems like a total waste of time. The point of this quickguide is to create a guestbook, something I could do in 5 minutes with regular naked non-framework php.
Here's my path to zend framework:
c:/program files/wamp/www/_zend/
Here's my path to my quickstart project:
c:/program files/wamp/www/_zend/bin/quickstart/
I have a number of questions at this point:
http://framework.zend.com/docs/quickstart/create-a-model-and-database-table
1: I'm running the command line to run my database loading script. I get an error stating the it can't find the Zend/AutoLoader.php becuase my path to the zend library is wrong. I followed all of the steps. I defined the path to my zend library in the main config file, but for some reason, its defined again in my db loader. In all of these scripts that they have me load, it points the relative path to the zend library as being /../library
Problem is, there's nothing in that folder. To get to my actual zend folder, you'd need to be (relatively) /../../../../library
Which brings me to my 2nd question:
2: Where the #$#$ is the main Zend files supposed to be? The install directions were basically "put it wherever you want", when the real answer (after a bunch of errors and wasted time was) was "put it somewhere so that its really easy to type the full path a thousand times in command line" and "it also better be in a runnable place on your webserver since its going to create your quickstart application in a subdirectory within zend".
Which brings us to the third question
3: Am I supposed to have this libary in both the parent core Zend (wamp/_zend/library) AND my application (quickstart/library)?
4: If that is the case, it seems like a ton of wasted files to be uploading. I'd like to use Zend to create products that my customers will download. 5 megs of overhead seems like a bit much. Zend claims you can use these library components separately, but it looks to me like I'm going to have to upload them every time.
Which leads to the next question:
5: It appears that perhaps Zend is more for a single application that is not supposed to be distributed. Is this not the case?
6: According to their default file structure everything but my /public folder would be above public_html on my server if I wanted this to rest on my TLD. I would need to rename every reference of /public/ to /public_html/, or am I missing something else?