A) I have gripes with everything, if you want to call them gripes.

B) I’ve *tried* CI for a project. It was pretty basic, didn’t allow for out of the box doctrine/phpunit integration (doctrine requires php5, and parts of phpunit were choking on the php4 in CI). CI prides itself on retaining PHP4 compatibility – that’s not something I need, nor something I’d recommend. It’s 2010 – use PHP5, and use a framework that at least acknowledges some aspects of PHP5 like autoloading, simpleXML, etc).

C) Kohana was a mess last I looked at it, and I suspect it will stay a mess. The project leadership at the time (based on reading IRC and forum posts) insists on ‘build it yourself’ and ‘make lots of changes often’ – this left the plugins I was looking at (5 different ones I was looking at) *all* in a state of flux (not indicating they worked with the current version). I don’t have time to dig that deep in to that sort of logistical mess – it only looked like it would be worse (plugin sprawl and aging is bad enough in Grails – it looked worse in Kohana with far less time on the market).

So… there’s an element of “yeah, I already know a bit of ZF”, but there’s also an element of – they all tend to have a lot of weaknesses, and it’d be better to spend your time on something that at least has one foot firmly in PHP5 already. limonade, lithium and others look interesting, but are probably things I won’t spend too much time on in the near future, based on available time.

I’m more in the ‘developer’ side of the house, and often have mixed feelings about dealing with the ‘other half’. I’m often handed a photoshop file which is literally impossible to recreate *exactly*. And it’s still impossible to recreate sanely while addressing A) memory/size/speed, B) browser compatibility and C) “web standards”. I quoted the web standards thing because there’s people that focus solely on that, and I don’t quite buy in to all that hype. I’ll use tables for layout when it fits the needs of the project. Perhaps when CSS3 is widely adopted in a few more years there’ll be even fewer uses for tables as a layout tool, but right now they still have a place in some situations.

The Django installer requires the user have superuser abilities, and however Grails can be installed by most any user. Furthermore, I am curious how the install process of both systems is handled on a Windows machine, as the prerequisite languages (Python and Java) are not installed by default.