Professional PHP

There is recent interest in consolidating Java frameworks with similar approaches. WebWork is joining Struts, which surprised me. Along the same lines, the Java Web Alignment group brings together many big players in the Java framework space:

The Java web framework landscape has become quite fragmented; the purpose of this group is to explore synergies among the existing frameworks that will make life easier for companies, organizations, and developers working using Java to build web applications.

A reaction to Rails?

As I suggested in The Value of MVC, the science of writing web applications is maturing and we are entering the age of frameworks.

Will there be a similar consolidation of PHP Frameworks? Or will Zend PHP Framework rule them all? eZ systems for one isn’t conceding just yet and continues with their eZ publish Enterprise Components. I expect other to do the same. We shall see.

Every once and a while I get an odd email from someone I have never heard of suggesting that WACT should merge with project X. The messages are usually poorly thought out and slightly insulting and never from anyone actually involved with either project X or WACT, but I certainly wouldn’t oppose such a thing if it made sense and there was some interest and synergy from the other party. Unfortunately, the fact that WACT 1.0 will support currently installed versions of PHP (meaning 4.x) is probably a deal breaker for the kinds of people who are interested in writing frameworks. After WACT 1.0 is out (Q1 2006) I would like to skip PHP 5 and target PHP 6 for WACT 2.0. (Other WACT stakeholders may have different ideas.) The framework landscape will probably be different then. And there is one other framework I’ve been keeping an eye on ….