Last Wednesday evening, I had the honor of presenting Zend Framework to BostonPHP, as part of an ongoing series they're holding on PHP frameworks; Horde was also represented as part of the evening's fare. It was the first time I've attended a UG, so I got the double whammy of that and being a presenter. Oh, make it a triple whammy — Boston is a 3+ hour drive from the Burlington, VT area I now call home.

All in all, the presentations went quite well. It was particularly fun to see what my friend Chuck Hagenbuch has been up to with Horde; his description and demonstration of RDO, or "Rampage Data Objects" was very cool (I really like the idea of "Horde on the Rampage" -- it's a very funny image for me), as was his working demonstration of using WebDAV to pull results via PHP in the Mac Finder.

A lot of people are interested in and working regularly with Zend Framework, at least based on the questions I was receiving. Attendees ranged from the "what does Zend do" category to the "We're standardizing on Zend Framework and use Zend products throughout our stack" category. The bulk of the comments I received were either of the flavor "I really like what I'm seeing" or wondering how mature/stable Zend_Db is. Unfortunately, at the time I was preparing the slides, there were many features in Zend_Db that can cause headaches, and I took some time to point these out; however most of these are soon to be history, due to the work of Bill Karwin and Simon Mundy, who are pushing to get a stable, usable DB abstraction layer out the door for ZF 1.0.

During the joint question and answer session, I started getting some particularly tough, pointed questions from one member of the group. I wasn't getting particularly rattled, but the moderator, Seth, decided to intervene and introduce me to my interlocutor — none other than Nate Abele of the CakePHP project. In the end, he joined Chuck and myself at the front of the room, and we had a nice panel discussing how the various frameworks handle different issues.

If you're ever in the Boston area, check to see if BostonPHP is having a meeting; it's a fun group.

My slides are now available; I've revised them slightly to fix some syntactical errors I noticed during the presentation, but otherwise they're what I presented. You may also want to check out the podcast.