Don't Waste My Time.

What follows is a critique and a complaint, not a rant. What's the difference, you ask? A rant, in my view, is a primal scream of frustration and near-impotent rage that often doesn't let a few (allegedly) non-essential facts get in the way of a good thrashing. It also takes far more energy than I'm able to summon at present, for reasons that may become clear below.

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As I've mentioned previously, I've been kicking the tires on the (relatively new) Kohana 3.0 application framework for PHP Web development. I'd previously used (and enthused about) the 2.3.x ("KO2") release; I was itching to get my hands dirty with 3.0.1 After a couple of dozen hours spent plinking away at it, however, I'm reevaluating my choices.

Two of the things that endeared the earlier system to me were the good-to-excellent, copious documentation and the active, always-willing-to-help user community (which, quite frankly, are the backbones of any open-source project).

KO3 is a different proposition entirely than KO2. As I write this, the eighth bug-fix update to 3.0 is available on the Web site. Since this is a new "the same, but different" project, all the users are starting fresh, so there can't be the same level of everyone-helps-everyone-else camaraderie as with KO2. This puts a foreseeable, far greater burden on the documentation to help people get productive as quickly and effectively as possible. However, the documentation, quite charitably, remains in a beta-quality state. This is true in comparison to both the earlier release and to other PHP Web frameworks such as Symfony2, CakePHP, FLOW3 and (notoriously) Zend. With most of these other frameworks, as with KO2, it was a quick, straightforward process figuring out how to get from the "hello-world" style demos, to being able to create a useful-but-simple site, to branching out from there. It's taken four times longer to get half as far with KO3 as with KO2.

Judging by comments in the Kohana support forums, I'm not alone in this; the documentation has been roundly panned by virtually all users who've bothered to comment. There's been far too much defensive "no, it isn't bad, you just need to read a bit more, and use the source, Luke" attitude from the project folks. During the KO2 lifecycle, the attitude I understood from their responses was more along the lines of "we know there are a few problems; we're working on them," quickly followed by "take a look at this." I don't know if 3.0 is so much more complex than 2.x that they simply don't have the bandwidth to document things to their previous standards. Frankly, I don't care any more.

I've decided that my existing projects that have been started in Kohana 2.3 will remain there; possibly moving to 2.4 when it becomes the officially-supported release. But I do not plan to invest any more time and effort into Kohana 3.0, at least until the new project has had some time to mature. I fully recognise the potentially self-defeating attitude inherent in that viewpoint. Virtually any open-source project depends on its community to "plug the holes" that the "official" project maintainers don't have time for or deliberately leave as open questions for the community. Well-run community projects are extremely collaborative, communication-rich environments.

Other projects take a "vendor/product" approach, essentially saying "Here's everything you'll need, soup-to-nuts; we'd really appreciate it if you built around the edges and took things deeper in your direction of interest, but the core that we're responsible for is solid." Those "vendors", the Zends and Sensio Labs of the world, have rich open-source offerings that they use as a platform to build (or offer) what actually pays the bills.

While I have a strong philosophical and experiential preference for community-driven (or at least -oriented) projects, there have to be times when I just want to Get Things Done rather than embark on an endless voyage of discovery.3 It is at those times that I'll reach for something that "just works" well enough for me to accomplish whatever it is I'm trying to do at the moment, whether it's to write a book or to bring up a client's Web site. I know and accept that any new tool, or new version of a tool I've used previously, will require a certain amount of time to "get up to speed" on. I don't know everything (or necessarily anything) before I learn it; the most I can hope for (and what I really do insist on) is that things make sense within the logical and semantic frameworks4 that they're expressed in, and that that expression is accessible, complete and correct enough that I can feel like I'm making progress. This invariably involves some sort of documentation; whether a "conventional" or online manual, a Wiki, or a user forum; the format is less important to me than the attributes I mentioned earlier.

Kohana 3.0, as it currently stands, does not meet that standard for me. And so I'm back in a feverish learn-and-evaluate mode with at least two other frameworks. I have projects to finish, and I have several chapters of a book I'm working on that had initially been written around Kohana 2, and will now need to be substantially redone.5

I intend to give each of those new candidate frameworks the same amount of time that it took me to get productive in Kohana 2.x (which was significantly less than the "industry leader," as I've previously mentioned). This is going to be an interesting week and a half or so, in the Chinese-curse sense of the word.

Footnotes:

1. Technical reasons for moving to KO3 included the switch from a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture to hierarchical MVC (or HMVC); if you know what these mean, you should know this is a Very Big Deal™. Additionally, I've found it a Very Bad Thing to tie myself to a legacy (obsolescent) project, and the end of KO2 is being made very plain on the Kohana Web site.(Return)

2. If the new, pre-release Symfony 2 code is as good as the documentation, we're in for a real treat.

3. I am typing this on a Mac rather than a Linux box, after all (though I have three Linux VMs running at the moment).(Return)

4. This implies, of course, that there are "logical and semantic frameworks" sufficiently visible, understandable and relevant to the task at hand. (Return)

5. I certainly don't want to fall into the same trap as a previous series of PHP books, which relied on the obsolete and inadequate Ulysses framework. Ulysses has been justly and productively panned, which has to reflect poorly on the aforementioned book (which I happen to own) and its authors. (Return)

Professionalism, Web development, and giving oxy to morons

Whereas a poor craftsman will blame his tools, poor tools will handicap even the most skilled craftsman.

As I insinuated in my previous post, I'm getting up to speed on the Zend Framework, the "900-kg elephant" of PHP application frameworks.

One major bone I have to pick with the ZF team is with regard to documentation: each time I've checked the site in the last couple of months, there's been an apparently current HTML version (now clocking in at some 300 HTML pages). There is also a PDF version, the promise of which is used as an enticement to register for their content distribution network (and, presumably, marketing info). As of this moment, however, the framework is at version 1.8.0, but the PDF version of the programmer's reference manual only covers version 1.6.0 (from September, 2008); some 12 releases earlier. It no longer fully matches the actual code, to the point where it is not difficult for a new developer to get deeply confused.

After spending a half-hour browsing the HTML version of the document, I am unable to find any declaration as to which version of the Framework is documented. However, the README.TXT file included with the source distribution states that it covers the 1.8 release, revision 15226, released on April 30, 2009. Classes which are listed in the README as being new, such as Zend_Filter_Encrypt, are documented in the HTML programmer's guide. Establishing a match between the (HTML) doc and the current code is non-trivial, however. While it may be argued that people unfamiliar with browsing a Subversion repository are not likely to be common within Zend's target audience, I would indirectly refute that: a product release, particularly one with a strong industry following, should be

• properly documented;
• easy for a (prospective) user to verify that he has the complete package; and
• with a definite, intuitive learning curve.

In my view, the Zend Framework fails on at least two of these points. The assertion within large segments of the PHP community that it is the "gold standard" of PHP application frameworks should be a disturbing, cautionary omen: if Web development, particularly PHP development, wishes to be taken seriously by the software industry at large, then some major improvements and attitude shifts need to occur quickly, publicly and effectively. It is still far too easy for potential developers outside the "early-adopter" leading edge to scoff that PHP development (and, by extension, Web development as a whole) is still far too immature and amateurish to be taken seriously. As someone who has developed professionally in PHP for some ten years now, that is a disturbing state of affairs; one that I would love to see (and participate in) a free-ranging discussion of.

OMFG, or Holy Deforestation, Batman!

As some of you know, I'm working on a book on Web development, using off-the-shelf tools (frameworks, template engines, JavaScript libraries, etc.) to leverage semantic, standards-compliant, accessible, search-friendly Websites. (That's more a matter of adjusting your development philosophy and workflow than anything else, but I digress). As part of that, I'e been doing a (reasonably) comprehensive review of PHP 5 application frameworks. You might have heard of ezComponents or CakePHP, but the 900-kg elephant in the room is definitely the Zend Framework. It ships with the Dojo JavaScript toolkit, but doesn't make it excessively difficult to mix and match others (Scriptaculous, Prototype, jQuery, etc.) if desired.

And here's another reason to call ZF the '900-kg elephant' — the programmer's reference guide (for version 1.7) weighs in at a <sarcasm>svelte</sarcasm> 1170 pages. Don't print this at home, folks. Better yet, just don't print it... either browse it online or download the PDF. Save a forest or six. For you old-timers, this will remind you quite a bit of US DOD Standard 2167A, "fondly" remembered as "documentation by the boxcar load".

It's easy to think there's a war going on...

(playing softly, in the background of my mind, The Beatles'Revolution)

....between the Web developers promoting nice, clean development with RESTful, semantic (X)HTML judiciously enhanced with CSS and JavaScript (henceforth often referred to as the "Army of Light") and those using "popular", "mainstream" frameworks such as CakePHP and the Zend Framework, who route everything through a Front Controller of some sort, and often seem to be in the dubious company of WS-Whatever Web services (which, I am reliably told, provide ample amounts of The Wrong Kind of job security — they know more about your app than you do, and aren't telling what they know). The sides would seem to be pretty cut-and-dried, judging from a lot of the blog activity (Google REST XML-RPC PHP to get a million and a half or so hits of light reading material). Except...

Briefly skimming through the Zend Framework documentation, for instance, and looking at the QuickStart and tutorials reinforces the idea that URL handling is routed through a front controller to an application-specific action controller, which is the C in the notorious (and some say overused) MVC (model-view-controller) framework. Originally developed to help improve desktop-application development, particularly in languages like Java and Smalltalk, it became popular for Web development because.... it seemed like a good idea at the time. Actually, for Web development in the Pleistocene (say, late-1990s), it was a good idea. Anything that cut through the estimated 27.612 interconnected details that needed to be simultaneously mastered to get a "Hello, World" EJB up and happy was, by its very existence, a Very Good Thing. And so, when shops moved to more productive, less pathologically irrational development systems than J2EE, the models and design patterns that had saved their bacon were brought over into the New World, to maintain conceptual touchstones that helped Useful Work Get Done. Happiness abounded throughout the realm, until apps started outgrowing the meager bounds of static HTML and became "Rich Internet Applications". (To the tune of "Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!", you hear faint murmurs of "AJAX and WS-* and REST, Oh My!") And, to pile on the snowclones, there really be dragons there.

'Dragons' in the form of falling into a GET-centric, action-oriented, everything-just-a-click-away world of convoluted Web apps with limited (re)usability and even less understandability to those who haven't swum there in some time. The entire promise of REST is simple: by centering applications around resources, rather than actions (through the use of URIs; Universal Resource Identifiers) and following the eminently sensible notion of not putting kilobytes of state information into those URIs (necessary information is POSTed along with the URI request), many problems that become painfully visible in large systems, simply go away. (Try sending a link to a cool book you found on Amazon over an instant messenger chat.)

But a typical, outsourced-development, haven't-really-used-this-tool-and-you-want-it-WHEN?!? developer isn't going to think of those things. He's going to grab a tool that has promising-sounding Google hits, run through a tutorial or two, and then plunge into the Son of the Enhancement of the Rewrite of yehey.com, with the customer sending him an "is it done yet?" email every six minutes. Clean design? What's that? Well-guarded state transitions? Who's got time to even understand that, let alone implement it? If we don't get it done, the customer's going to pull the project and send it to Vietnam or somewhere...

Just to make one point absolutely clear: I don't mean to be picking on Zend and CakePHP as being more than simply representative of widely-used, well-reputed tools that can be used to get the unwary, rushed developer (are there any other kind earning a paycheck?). While it is entirely practical to write semantic, RESTful Web applications in both frameworks (and both document how to do so), it's like, say, RPG; a fantastic tool for solving problems in a well-defined domain, usable with significant effort outside that domain, and Zeus help you if you use it to write an MMORPG.

The real point of this rant, if it hasn't hit you like a Muhammad Ali speed-anchor punch, is another pout over the state into which we've allowed the once-honorable craft of software development (of which Web development is but a specific case) into absolute bollocks. We've allowed the pay-any-price-to-cut-costs, pinch-a-penny-until-you-can-hear-it-scream-from-Boise-to-Bangalore idiots pervert us from Muhammad Ali (or at least Sonny Liston) into Herschel Shmoikel Pinkus Yerucham Krustofski. A plurality, if not yet an overwhelming majority of those who call themselves "software development 'engineers'" have been given neither sufficient formal training in their craft nor the resources (time, money, support, etc.) to continue learning as they go. "If you can spell EJB and ERP, you're the guy for us — as long as you're young and dirt cheap. And when you're done with that, we've got some BASIC code we want in Java instead."

So at the unique moment in history when ephemeral intellectual artifacts have assumed primacy in a wide range of human affairs, the humans whose intellect is responsible for their creation and correct functioning have progressively less ability to do the job properly. The way that, if they sit back and think for a moment, they know should be possible, has to be possible in any sort of rational omniverse whatsoever. But few, if any, ever get that chance for reflection. Fewer still, having reflected, researched and enlightened themselves, are welcomed back into the paying ranks who toil away at this once-noble craft.

And my Zend Framework code still feels slimy. It's not Zend's fault, at least, not entirely. Front controllers are good; front controllers are your friends; front controllers are.... *crunch!*