For the past month I have been researching, learning, testing, and evaluating various libraries and frameworks to use for Web development. I have previously written about my less-than-satisfactory experience with the monolithic client side MVC frameworks. I also discarded my initial plan to use WordPress for authentication and access control, because of the baggage that WordPress brings with it. Then I started in on Zend, a server side framework that is less monolithic than the client side frameworks.

Zend does allow you to use just the components you want. In particular, I am interested in Zend_Auth for login/logout and in Zend_Acl for access control.

• Getting Started with Zend_Auth
• PHP Login with Zend_Auth
• Implementing Zend_Auth and Zend_Acl
  1. Part 1
  2. Part 2

Looking into the above references it does appear that I’ll need to implement the Zend MVC framework to at least a limited extent to leverage authentication and access control. That’s doable.

Let’s shelf authentication and access control for the moment and look at what we’re trying to create. First and foremost, the clients wants a “Dispatch” screen, associating techs with assigned jobs for a given day. We must be able to display a minimum of 80 jobs simultaneously. Something like this:

Alexander
Apt	Unit	AM/PM	Jobs

David
Apt	Unit	AM/PM	Jobs

Gabriel
Apt	Unit	AM/PM	Jobs

Joseph
Apt	Unit	AM/PM	Jobs

Mason
Apt	Unit	AM/PM	Jobs

Samual
Apt	Unit	AM/PM	Jobs