Software design decisions.

I would say just the opposite. Frameworks exist to make default decisions for us and give order to disorder. Libraries exist to help us solve complex issues (image processing, language processing, etc etc)

That’s like saying, I want to build a house, but I don’t want to use any blueprints because they force too many decisions on me. The flexibility of a hammer and nails is all I need to build a house. Well… that’s the whole point of blueprints, to make sure you perform something to guidelines, safety tolerances, etc etc.

That said I have been following ZF since very very early days and it has now come to a point where I may really use it in a commercial project ;-)

Yes, that’s the point I was trying to make. I see flexibility as an advantage. The combination of flexibility and smart design can reduce the maintenance burden. It’s up to us, the developers, to change our thinking when using a flexible framework. Like I said before, frameworks exist to help us solve complex issues, not to make decisions for us.

@mgkimsal There are situations in which having flexibility you don’t immediate need is important. As a decision maker on a project- a role I happen to have taken on many times- you are often very interested in the ‘worst case scenarios’. IE, what if this requirement came up that doesn’t jive with our conventions, or what happens if my requirements outgrow my framework? The additional flexibility is very important for risk management in this case. These considerations shouldn’t outweigh day-to-day development, however, and with the right software I believe you can have the best of both worlds.

@Tarique Sani I’m down with opinionated software, but much less so with opinionated frameworks. For example, who cares whether the authors of Rails (not to pick on them- this is just the best example I know of) think REST is better than SOAP when you’ve got to integrate your app with a web service that is based on SOAP by EOD today? The fact is both are out there in the wild, and I find it hard to see how a framework can express an ‘opinion’ like this without significantly limiting the applications that are built on it. In the ZF project, we’d rather leave the opinions up to the developer and provide suggestions based on our own experience. These typically manifest as sensible defaults.

@Federico At the most basic level, I simply don’t see complexity and flexibility as a trade off (to put your thesis in completely over-simplified terms ;) ). I would describe this as a ‘false tradeoff’ that is widely assumed but can easily be dispelled with the right counterexample. On the ZF project, we’re trying to provide a counterexample to many such false tradeoffs; whether we’ve done this effectively or not is a different matter. Ultimately, you could have made the same argument using practically any technology. That is to say, it isn’t that hard to obfuscate any design. I can easily show you how to do it in a Rails, Django, etc. application out there. Start by replacing all newlines with spaces in your app. ;) It is inevitable that one must rely on human intelligence and judgment for good, maintainable design, otherwise we’d all be out of jobs while our computers programmed themselves.
For ZF, the core team endeavors to provide some of that judgment while not enforcing it. Again, that’s just our goal; how we deliver on that is up to the community to decide.

,Wil