Two years ago today Marcus and I released the very first version of CEP on SourceForge (CEP is no longer in development). Web application development has come a long way in two years. MVC is king and AJAX is the hot topic. Ruby on Rails meets most (if not all) of the goals we ever had for CEP. Tapestry has taken it to a new level by attempting to remove the developer’s need to even think in terms of HTTP requests. Yet somehow, there is still not a really solid PHP development framework.

That may be harsh, there are plenty of decent projects out there for PHP, but none seem to have much community support. I spent some time playing with Symfony tonight. I read that it is inspired by Rails but that they are doing things in a way that leverages the strengths of PHP5. Somehow something seems lost in the translation. Maybe I was expecting to see the same kind of quick-start Rails gives you, but it looks like a lot of work to get started and the code just doesn’t look pretty to me. Also, one thing with CEP was that we found defining a bunch of constants was expense, so I was sad to see the configuration file seems to be converted into a bunch of constants. Would a global config object not be better?

Now I don’t want this to be mistaken for a review of Symfony, maybe my expectation were just too high. I wonder if Zend will be able to do better. From what I saw of the Zend Framework CVS structure, it is at least similar to Symfony.

As an aside, is anyone using Propel under a heavy DB load? (let’s say 200+ queries per second)
If so, how is it holding up?