Why I don’t use EZ Components or the Zend Framework

Posted by santosj on April 21, 2006

1. Licenses

I don’t want to be restricted to their licenses and I want to be able to sell the project if at all possible. I haven’t even decided what license I’m going to use for the game engine project. I may use the projects as research as it is worked on by some very intelligent people and coding by example is how I learned up to this point anyway. The only issue is that I can’t use any of the code in the frameworks or I’ll still be subject to their license. Which is why I’ve been hesitant up to this point to look too far into how they do things.

2. Bloat

I don’t need all of what the frameworks offer. Also, I would have to find out if I could package the frameworks with my game engine, but most likely would depend on them to download the separate packages themselves and copying only what they need. Some may get it, many others would not and I would lose them to another game engine.

3. Class Design

Some of the techniques are difficult for me to understand, so even through I’m using classes and limiting the developers that would want to work on or with the code, using MVC or class designs other than a Factory seems to be far to difficult to force onto other developers. Developers may have some class experience but would otherwise shy away from a project that depended on developing multiple different classes to even do a simple task.

4. Learning Experience

I want to see if I can do certain things myself to gain the perspective in what it takes to develop the different technologies. If I just use another’s technology, then I can understand how to use theirs and learn it well, but I’ll never learn how they developed it. I would be completely dependable on what they code and how they code it. If I wanted something else, I would either have to go to another framework, or try to add it myself. I would learn from editing the framework that I’m using, but it would take longer.

I have been able to develop two different factory based classes without any documentation or help and had it work with a small amount of bugs.

Why I should use the developed Frameworks

I would be using something that has been tested, developed, and maintained by a group of experienced talented programmers with years of programming far beyond my own. I’m only self taught working on PHP and classes for a few years compared to those who have been programming PHP and other languages for more than a decade. I’m not saying I’m better than them, just that I want to learn and solve my own problems for the moment.

I do use SPL, which could be considered a framework, but a lot of it is built into the language and offers many different features that would be impossible any other way. Since it is built into the language, I don’t have to depend on the other developers to download a separate package, just require the version of PHP 5 or 6. However, SPL is somewhat faster since it is part of the language.

The issue is also that everyone is developing the same wheel over and over again and not using what someone else started or developed. If you look at the number of forums out there, you will find a large number of various features and stablity. You will find that one forum usually offers a feature not in another but also lacks a key feature found in another project. If either one of the developers took the time to combine projects and work towards the same goal, then they could both have the same features and work on only one forum. The same could be applied to the number of game engines. That compared to the online games that actually make a profit and have a large (100,000+) active userbase.

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