That being said, there are some wonderful classes out there. The building blocks of the Zend Framework are well built and pretty well documented, and we know that work will continue to be done on them. For database work, there are many abstraction classes, but one that stood out to me was Doctrine.

There are a few tutorials here and there about building your own framework from pieces or from scratch. Who has the time for that? Well, a friend and I did have time a while back, and we came up with a pretty nice solution. Feel free to take a peek at the presentation I threw together for a recent AZphp meeting. The idea was to create a highly flexible modular framework without having to build the whole thing ourselves or continuously reinvent the wheel. We also wanted something that other people are already working on and already being used in applications. We decided to just start with checkouts of ZF and Doctrine

The framework’s “bootstrap” pretty much sets up the basis for a MVC application. Your custom files take it from there utilizing whatever building blocks from Zend Framework (or anything else) you want to use.

Now, I’m not going to say it’s any where near “stable”, but versions of it have been used for production web applications. In the coming weeks, I will be building some usage documentation for the core itself and a few basic application tutorials (the ever-popular “build-a-blog” tutorial that most frameworks release will probably be ready next weekend). Until then, you can check it out via Subversion here. What you check out is to be a “library” directory under your application. You can see the directory layout in the presentation linked above.