The End of One Era, The Beginning of Another
Don't let the title fool you, I'm actually not about to embark on another journey down my twisted political mind. Instead, I'd like to pay tribute to a piece of my development history that has served me dutifully over the past 4.5 years. Most anyone who reads this blog will at least be familiar with the existence of ZSF, and some may even use it for their own purposes. Regardless, tonight we celebrate all that it was and respectfully retire it into the software heavens. (For anyone not following, this means that I'm not doing anymore work on ZSF, just to be clear)
Now that we have the emotional part of this out of the way, we'll get to the good news. In lieu of the loss of ZSF, I have been working with some good friends and new colleagues to create 'ZSF Reincarnated', which we have called The N2 Framework. The specifics of the plan for N2F are somewhat complicated, but for the moment we are working on one particular strain of the framework code named Yverdon. Yverdon is the evolution of 4 and a half years of experience with ZSF bundled into one system.
Yverdon intends to be both simple and flexible for developers, on top of offering top performance and extremely low overhead. The system is currently modular based, but is flexible enough to be overridden into most other popular patterns (including MVC). Yverdon has been tested with PHP 5.2+ and should work with earlier versions of PHP 5. Since the PHP group has been working to end it's work on PHP 4, we have opted to not make the framework PHP 4 compatible. The system is currently being tested on both Windows and Linux environments to ensure that our code truly embraces PHP's cross-platform goodness.
Keep in mind that this is a very early release of the system. Though we have worked hard to make the release functional, we can not guarantee that things will not change moving forward, nor can we assure you that there will not be bugs. Our web site is in development and will provide easy ways to submit issues to the development team so that we can work them out. We're looking forward to building a community around this framework and will rely on community feedback to shape the direction of the framework in the future, so don't be shy.
When the web site has been finished, I'll make sure to mention it at this blog. Special thanks have to go to Chris, Matt, Patrick, Clemens and Javier for their various efforts towards this first release. Working with each of them has been great so far and I think we're all looking forward to coaxing the true potential out of Yverdon in the months (and hopefully years) to come.
- Andy
Labels: Development, Self, Zibings Technologies


