The frontend of the project is going to just use the Zend Application MVC tool, but for the backend I’m using ExtJS. I’ve been a fan of ExtJS and used it for a few projects now but this time I’m trying something new – I’m using Zend_Json_Server to provide the data directly to ExtJS. I’m still working out how it works, but basically you create the objects on the backend, enable Zend_Json_Server and then your objects and methods are available right within the Ext.Direct and Ext.DataStore objects. Very slick. Once I’ve figured it out more I’ll post some links to the resources that helped me the most.

Also, it seems that everytime I log into WP there is a software update… maybe I need to post more.

CakePHP

Not a huge fan. My understanding is that CakePHP spawned from a desire to replicate the Ruby on Rails movement in PHP. My experience though is that it is slow and poorly documented. They try to get you to do things their way and I’m just not a big fan of that. I can understand trying to standardize for the sake of rapid development, but then you are stuck with development methods which work for small scale projects and not large complicated ones.

Zend Framework

This is the framework I’ve had the most experience. It’s got great documentation and a very active community. It does have the biggest learning curve though. While it’s true that ZF was more of a library in the past, they’ve made great strides to provide an application framework and a pretty decent one at that. It’s flexible and extensible. You can quickly whip up a small project and the system is adaptable enough that you can also build out large scalable projects.

CodeIgniter

CI is a great choice for those who don’t want to deal with the learning curve of ZF. It’s fast, well documented and has a great development community. It’s supported by a great company who has done a great job developing and promoting the framework. After working with CakePHP it felt refreshing to work with CI. Things were cleaner, faster, and just made more sense to me.

Summary

You can probably tell that I’m not a CakePHP fan. If I hadn’t picked up ZF for a few projects earlier in the year I probably would use CodeIgniter for everything. It’s still a bit of a toss up.

The PHP website has a good method of stripping out those slashes if you are unable to turn off magic_quotes_gpc (http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/security.magicquotes.disabling.php). But what if you need it on to run your legacy code? Here is the inverse of the solution that is provided on the PHP website:

if (!get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
	function addslashes_deep($value)
	{
		$value = is_array($value) ?
		array_map('addslashes_deep', $value) :
		addslashes($value);
		return $value;
	}

	$_POST = array_map('addslashes_deep', $_POST);
	$_GET = array_map('addslashes_deep', $_GET);
	$_COOKIE = array_map('addslashes_deep', $_COOKIE);
	$_REQUEST = array_map('addslashes_deep', $_REQUEST);
}

Put that at the beginning of your script and it will add all of the slashes back in. Not ideal, but if you have no other option it will get you going again.