[hackernewz]

ZF and CI are horrible examples of coding practices. They are extreme examples of "make a class for everything because you can". ZF file and directory structure is at odds with PHP 6's namespaces, in fact it will probably have to be completely thrown away to make way for a ZF 2.

CI doesn't even have the base class of any "controller" defined anywhere for you to read. It is created on the fly every request. This guy is a noob and doesn't understand what good programming is.

[eropple]

I rarely respond to people who use "noob" in a non-ironic way, but whatever: ZF's file and directory structure is not appreciably at odds with namespaces; it is different but (as it works pre-5.3) complementary.

If you look at Symfony2, it can handle both namespaces and Zend-named objects without significant trouble. ZF 2 will change it because namespaces are now available, but the old style of library importing will certainly persist because it has to.

[edtechre]

I actually agree here. CI is barely a framework. When I used it, I found myself writing a bunch of custom code to handle encapsulating view logic like widgets, decorators, etc. Plus, plenty of other code to handle form validation etc. Other frameworks provide all of this out of the box.

I dislike ZF because it tries too hard to be like Java/Struts2, and borrows a lot of Java's verbosity and bloat.

I use Yii a lot nowadays, and use phing for deployments. And for Python folks, I'd recommend web2py since it has a lot of similarities to Yii from what I've seen.