The much-anticipated Zend Framework was released a couple of days ago, and I finally got around to looking at it today. I really wasn’t impressed much.

It’s really not much more than PEAR, with a sloppy MVC framework tacked on. I certainly don’t think it’s not a useful library: the Zend_InputFilter class looks very handy, and the Zend_Db stuff is an interesting implementation (though, I’m not sure if I’ll be switching away from ADOdb anytime soon).

I’m still not currently using a formal MVC framework (I haven’t yet found one I really like – though I do implement something similar the view-controller part without object oriented code), and by the looks of things, I won’t be building any applications using just the Zend Framework, either.

Okay, so it’s written by the people behind PHP. Is this really the best benefit it has over any other framework? I certainly don’t seem to be alone in thinking this way.