Advice on Zend or CI for project

Question

I have a new site that I am currently in the process of mapping out. The best way to put it would be that it will be A LOT like youtube.

I need openid support, and video upload support. There is no official openid library for CI and the only one it has seems outdated / could become outdated.

However Codeigniter is fast <- pretty much the only thing keeping me from switching over to Zend.

I guess my real question is: is Zend's performance REALLY bad enough to keep me using CI. I know that one can use Zend libraries with CI, but if you are going to use parts of Zend, why not just use the whole thing?

Or would it be beneficial for me to "figure it out" with Codeigniter?

Answer 1

Well a couple things:

1. Performance of either framwork out of the box shouldnt be a key concern. With this type of site (as youve described) youre going to have to optimize DB read/writes as well as cache like a mofo.

2. Given #1, i would use whatever you feel most comfortable with... theres no reason to make the project more difficult than it needs to be.

3. There is absolutely no reason to use Zend Framework in its entirety if you only need one component. Thats the reason its built like it is... so you can pick and choose. I routinely use components from Zend in my preferred framework, Symfony. Dont be afraid to mix and match.

4. Using ZF as full stack is going to be incredibly more time consuming that using CI because a.) youre more familar with CI and b.) even ZF's full stack leaves A LOT to be desired - there still a ton of glue youre going to have to write, plus if you want an ActiveRecord like db interface with code generation youre going to have to hook in Doctrine, Propel, or whatever you like (im assuming CI has an active record implementation out of the box?).

Answer 2

If you can afford the time to implement the OpenID library for CI, do so. Or, like prodigitalson said, you can use this single component from ZF [CI supports it, probably you'll need to do some modifications].

From my experience, developing with ZF isn't that easy, it takes time to learn and produce a well implemented web app.