Those wacky bitheads over at IBM are at it again. This time, Nicholas Case has posted part 1 of a 9 part series in which he builds a sample application using the Zend Framework. To kick things off, Nicholas state a truth about programmers that I think most of us would agree with.

We programmers are a paradoxically lazy lot. By that, I mean that we will spend hours, even days, creating something that allows us to complete a task in 30 seconds instead of five minutes.

From that humble statement of truth he builds. This article is light on code but long on laying the groundwork for the sample application, a RSS reader. To his credit Nicholas asked and answered the question that everyone was wondering

Does the world really need another online feed reader? Maybe. But I don’t care if I’m the only one who uses it, and that’s the whole point: The Zend Framework aims to make things simple enough that I can take on projects just because I want to, and not because I’ve justified it with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of research.

Nicholas walks us through a brief recent history of web development. He then launches into an overview of the framework and it’s components. Nothing you can’t find in the manual but it’s all listed here for us in one place. The rest of this part of the series is dedicated to getting everything setup and making sure we understand the basic concepts.

It’s hard to judge the entire tutorial from this installment. By his own admission Nicholas states that we don’t do much coding in this first installment. But if the level of detail and the clear “de-buzzworded” language is any indication of what the rest of the tutorial will be like, this is going to be a winner.

=C=