The Zend Framework Webinar just finished. To be honest, I got to both nerd out and have some fun with it - including poking fun at the ZF team and Wil for dropping his mic.

There were a lot of topics discussed, including the future of Zend Framework, current challenges, and addressed concerns. They did let us know (I don’t subscribe to the Zend newsletter so I didn’t know this) that ZF has crossed the five million download mark, a jaw dropping number, as well as whispered some confirmation about integration with a third party javascript library. While I can postulate that the library will be either Dojo or jQuery (Dojo is used by a couple in the ZF team, and jQuery has critical mass), they pointed out (and re-iterated) that they don’t want to lock the community into one solution. If I want to use mooTools, YUI, etc, I’ll be able to. Cool.

Here’s what I got out of the webinar:

Be “just a wee bit more” Involved
There needs to be more visibility from the entire ZF team. Guys, let’s be honest, the person getting the most visibility right now is Matthew, and while I think he’s a splendid lad, there are more of you - I’m not saying that I don’t hear from Wil or Ralph or Darby, but I’d like to see more articles from you folks on DevZone and your particular blogs.

Go For More Community Involvement
There were a bunch of ideas tossed around, from building demo apps, open sourcing the code of the framework site (which isn’t going to happen any time soon, but they haven’t ruled it out) to having guest bloggers. Yes Wil, I will volunteer if needed =P. The problem that I addressed when I piped up is that projects like zfforums.com, despite having good intentions, don’t have the critical mass of users to make me prefer them to the mailing lists. And I hate email.

CLI Tools, With More On The Horizon
The challenge of developing CLI tools was addressed, and I translated this as “We’re working on it”. I wouldn’t mind a few code generation tools guys, that’s all I ask for. Creating all those blasted folders and files when I get a new project is sooo tedious.

The Future Is Bright and Shiny!
With talk about 2.0 (or 3.0 and 4.0, depending on who’s wise-cracks you listen to), Zend Framework Certification and lots of new code stuff - like Zend Framework Extras and scaffolding - the future looks bright indeed for the Zend Framework. There’s even talk about generating revenue!

Suffice it to say that I’ll be sticking with ZF, and blogging about it, for the foreseeable future.

There’s also more feedback via Joshteam’s Weblog.