I have a dream*
You probably saw that I started experimenting with Zend Framework. I used to develop in PHP for 5 years, between 2000 and 2005. Worked for almost 2 years at Dorten, renamed 100 Days, later bought by Zend - their Stuttgart office. Before the Zend time we had in-house CMS system, closed source. Nobody had the time and resources to have it released. It's name was EWMS (Eierlegende WollMilchSau - Wikipedia has an entry about this animal ). This CMS allowed us quickly to build applications. However, it wasn't just clicking and using wizzardry to generate new sites, then fill them with content.
After I saw what Zend_Form might can do, according to the slides of its author, which I read, I have a dream*.
My dream is a Zend_Form/Zend_Framework based application, which is a wizzard for creating mini applications or larger ones where some of the code is still a stub and should be filled with meat. According to the documentation Zend_Form allows subforms. How do I see it?
- Form asks about how many controllers.
- Form asks for names of the controllers.
- Form asks for the actions of every controllers.
- Now we can create a stub application, which can be filled with meat from the dev. Create the PHP and the PHTML files.
- But we go further.
- Form asks whether the DB tables are existing or should be created
- Let's handle existing tables
- The user is asked for the names of the tables, although some kind of autodiscovery might be done.
- The user is asked for the primary keys and how the tables are related
- The wizzard creates the Zend_DB_Table classes, INI configuration file and so on.
- The wizzard creates a layout and uses Zend_Layout
- The wizzard creates a stub CSS file, a helper class to embed it, and references it from the layout
- That is :)
