General control question

tmasboa

Hi, I am new to these forums and semi-new to PHP. I have started using Zend and so far it's worked okay.

I just have been wondering if there is some type of set of control/widgets for like php tables, and so forth. Like in ASP.nET you ahve all the asp:controls which allow really rich stuff.

Also, I'm not clear if zend/cake is better and their advanteages?

YAOMK

I never used ASP so I have no clue of the control/widgets you refer to, but Zend Studio is a nice IDE with many neat features. I find the integration with the rdbms and the server debugger (Zend Platform) very useful. My one complaint is the browser which is quite slow and not really useful and the one thing that annoys me is that when using objects the IDE doesn't code hint the "->" operator, which would streamline ones coding when using OOP. Other than the already mentioned issues, I find Zend Studio to be a handsome IDE.

bpat1434

When comparing Zend or Cake, are you talking frameworks? If you are, then you're going to get opinions for and against both. I personally would go for Zend since those at Zend are the creators of PHP. Can't really go wrong there can ya?

As for adding "controls" for forms and inputs, there isn't really anything out there that's like a MS GUI like ASP.net or anything. What you could do is maybe set up your own framework for forms. Zend doesn't support generic HTML form controlls like checkboxes & textareas. Although one could easily create a simple function or class to create their own "framework" for creating such items.

YAOMK

Oh so those are the controls you were referring to. I've used Visual Studio in the past for C# development and I always found those controls a little lame, I can see and understand their purpose, but I rather build my code from scratch or built on top of more of my own code lol.