In this new post to his site Matthew Weier O'Phinney looks at a common misconception there seems to be for people using the Expressive framework from Zend - that their applications should be entirely configuration-driven.

Enrico just returned from phpDay, where he spoke about Expressive and the upcoming Zend Framework 3. One piece of feedback he brought back had to do with how people perceive they should be building Expressive applications: many think, based on our examples, that it's completely configuration driven!

As it turns out, this is far from the truth; we developed our API to mimic that of traditional microframeworks, and then built a configuration layer on top of that to allow making substitutions. However, it's not only possible, but quite fun, to mix and match the two ideas!

Matthew goes on to share an experiment he tried using his own code to "tweak" things away from being configuration-driven to a more programmatic approach. He shares a few tips to remember when trying the same with your application too. The post ends with an example of this migration and some of the benefits/issues that could come from the change.