Apache Zeta Components (eZ Components)

Clean, tested (unit tests and community), strict seperated, head first and a nice example, how to program real enterprise code.

When we first heart about the eZ Component project, we were anxious to what will come and how it compares to PEAR packages, which we were using for a long time in our company. After a first look at the source, an internal dicussion showed that we were in doubt about the way they handle things. First of all they use this non PEAR naming and files are not named like class names. And so we stopped reviewing this project.

Then in january 2007 we got a request from one customer, to implement some extensions for our content management system in really short time. These extensions had to provide image manipulation and it needed to send these images around in form of html mails. At this point we came back to eZ Components because they provide all functions we needed to realize this project and they have excellent documentation, including tutorials, for each component which was very important for this project. We chose to write a new ez Components based sub system that's integrated in our controller and permission system, instead of extending our file manager in this short time.

Here are the components we used for this project:

* ImageAnalysis
* ImageConversion
* Mail
* PersistentObject
* UserInput

I was pleasing how fast you can develop with eZ Components if you know it once and our initial doubt about their own naming scheme for classes and files were disproved. We successfully finished the project in time and our customer was absolutely satisfied and we were happy about this new tool. Since this project we started to port parts of our content management system to eZ Components. Their fully tested code fits 100% into our development process where we use unit tests for code quality and so almost everything in our application is tested by now.

For us one greate plus of the eZ Components library instead of a framework is, that you can choose what you want, with less pain. Most frameworks I have seen define a default way of handling things, which is really good if you go their way, but if not you must implement workarounds or you have to write much glue code to integrate your own stuff.

I have developed several sites using eZ Components. From my experience the code quality is higher than in most of the open source projects. Detailed documentation with plenty of examples.

I like eZ Components because it does not force me to develop my projects in a certain way (vs frameworks). I can just "drop in" the components I need and the rest is done via autoloading.

I recommend eZ Components to all PHP5 developers.

I was lucky to watch a presentation here in Brazil by Derick Rethans, and get in touch with ezComponents.

I am using ezComponents as a base for my current development framework, and it works great, lots of resources and diferent options to get the work done.

Great job!