The SitePoint PHP blog has a new article posted with some first impressions of the Nette framework, a larger but not often talked about PHP framework that showed up in their framework survey results in third place.

SitePoint’s PHP channel conducted its annual survey on the most popular framework of 2015 and the results were discussed here. We saw some familiar names: Laravel, Symfony2, Phalcon, Silex, Slim, etc. But wait, what is this: Nette? According to the survey result, it ranked number 3 in both “at Work” and “in Personal Projects”, just tailing the two giants: Laravel and Symfony2.

I had never heard of this framework before the survey results got published. A framework so popular is worth looking into. Thus, in this article, we will take a look at Nette, see what it can do and discuss some of the features.

The Nette framework is a "set of decoupled and reusable PHP components" that combine into a complete framework (including templating, error tracing and unit testing integration). He follows along with their Getting Started guide and helps you get a demo application copy up and running (via Composer). He then goes through the project structure, the "Adminer" tool, route handling, controllers/actions and the "Latte" templating engine. He also covers basic security functionality and some other interesting features like the "Tracy" debugger and the use of the integrated unit test functionality.

Gonzalo Ayuso has added a new post to his blot today with some of his opinions on namespaces in PHP.

I’ve been working wih my first project using namespaces in PHP. As a PHP developer I have been suffering the lack of a program language without namespaces for years. But now it’s over. Finally we have namespaces in PHP since PHP 5.3. My early impressions wasn’t good.

He talks about how, originally, he didn't like the naming conventions for namespaces but eventually he embraced them and realized some of the extra benefits they format gives. He still wonders, though, if they are better than some of the more traditional namespecing methods.

Lorna Mitchell has posted an article to the Ibuildings blog looking at the Zend_Paginator component of the Zend Frameworks, some of her first impressions.

The idea of this module is to allow collections of data to be paginated. It takes the set, restricts the results, and can also generate the page numbers you need to move around between the resulting paginated data. Basically it saves me writing the same pagination code multiple times and then having to fix the bug where the last result on the previous page appears on the next ... all this has been thought of already.

She shows how it works with a simple example - paginating results from a database table, setting the count per page and the current page number. This object is pushed out to the view and rendered (in her case) via a Smarty template.

Jonathan Snook has posted some of his first impressions of the Zend Framework to his blog today - and so far, they're pretty good:

Last week, the first production release of the Zend Framework was released. I've taken some time to read through the documentation to understand what each of the components do. And you know what? I think I like it.

He talks about what the framework is, how it compares to the CakePHP framework and his example of making a simple del.icio.us class to pull recent posts from a feed.

Jonathan Snook has posted some of his first impressions of the Zend Framework to his blog today - and so far, they're pretty good:

Last week, the first production release of the Zend Framework was released. I've taken some time to read through the documentation to understand what each of the components do. And you know what? I think I like it.

He talks about what the framework is, how it compares to the CakePHP framework and his example of making a simple del.icio.us class to pull recent posts from a feed.

Evert Pot has posted some of his initial impressions of the latest version of PHPUnit that he got his hands on - PHPUnit 3:

For a testing framework I picked PHPUnit. My main reason for picking this was that its fully written in PHP5, it can produce some pretty good reports and the biggest reason is simply because I hear a lot of good stuff about it.

Among his thoughts were mentions of PHPUnit's great documentation (but made it hard to just get started), a bit of unintuitive functionality with the addTestSuite method and some of the pain that it took to get together a full suite of tests.

Evert Pot has posted some of his initial impressions of the latest version of PHPUnit that he got his hands on - PHPUnit 3:

For a testing framework I picked PHPUnit. My main reason for picking this was that its fully written in PHP5, it can produce some pretty good reports and the biggest reason is simply because I hear a lot of good stuff about it.

Among his thoughts were mentions of PHPUnit's great documentation (but made it hard to just get started), a bit of unintuitive functionality with the addTestSuite method and some of the pain that it took to get together a full suite of tests.