However this one is written by Zend (who are pretty important the PHP sphere - a Redhat to your Linux, an IBM to your Java - not an inventor but a significant contributor), so it’s probably worth checking out.
I’m never sure about frameworks. If documentation is limited, it may be quicker to knock your own version up rather than try to understand someone else’s code - you also get the added bonus of a deeper understanding of the issues involved which can greatly speed up debugging and make you sound knowledgeable in the pub. There’s also usually quite a big overhead in terms of code that’s included which won’t get used. You also get tied to their way of doing things and as such your app becomes subject to the whim and fancy of their developers. On the other hand, they are often much more thoroughly debugged than your own code (particularly the open source ones due to the amount of feedback they are likely to receive) and probably written by someone a lot better at it than you are.
Some frameworks seem to do more than just add a few short cuts, syntactic sugar and convenience methods though, and these are the ones that really interest me. At the moment I’m eyeing up the rather fabulous looking Prototype for the pet project (which barring a few silly layout issues which will be fixed in the Great Refactoring and Redesign over the summer, now works in Internet Explorer, hurrah! - Ah, how coursework deadlines wonderfully focus the mind on other things), as it actually extends the JavaScript language in a genuinely useful way. For example, it adds a method called getElementsByClassName to the DOM. Why wasn’t it there in the first place? Exactly.
It’s not all roses and plum pudding though - the word ‘extends’ nearly brings me out in a cold sweat, as that’s exactly the sort of thing Microsoft and Netscape were doing at the end of the last century, and we all know how that ended up. But to get a sense of perspective back, the Prototype library is just a JavaScript document that you add to your page, no more, no less. It’s not some sort of browser plugin, extension, hack or other massive change inducing thing. The code is there to see and they take particular pains to get it to function identically on whatever platform.
Hmm..*
* = I can’t think of a suitable closing sentence and I’ve got a compiler to write, so ‘hmm’ will have to do.
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