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This morning I was curious to see how the battle for domination between PHP frameworks was shaping up, and which one was most economically sensible for a developer with limited time to learn. I thought I'd share my results with the list, as this may be of interest to some of you. To gauge the demand for knowledge of particular frameworks, I did an informal survey of job descriptions on the SF Bay Area Craigslist's job posting. (I did not look act gigs--computers.) I entered the query "php framework" and got 38 results. Of these, I threw out results that were looking for someone to work primarily in another language (such as C#, Java, Python, etc.) or doing something not particularly PHP oriented, such as client-side development. I also threw out duplicates (there were several) and positions where the word framework was used to refer to something else, such as the LAMP technology stack, or an aspect of the application to be built. I eliminated 18 positions, leaving me with 20 descriptions. For my purposes, I defined a framework as a piece of prebuilt software that facilitates the development of Web applications using the MVC design pattern. Smarty (a template engine), Doctrine (a standalone ORM utility), and Drupal were described as frameworks twice, once, and once, respectively. Utilities for other languages such as Spring, Hibernate, and Django also generated hits, but were not counted. If the job was clearly a PHP job and mentioned knowledge of a framework or MVC design patterns as desirable, I counted it as "Unnamed". If more than one framework was mentioned, I tallied each one named. In those cases, no job description surveyed named which framework the company used or favored. The results were pretty lopsided: Unnamed: 8 Zend: 11 CakePHP: 4 Symfony: 4 Code Igniter: 2 Overwhelmingly, if only one framework was specifically named, it was Zend. I also did a tally of JavaScript libraries named in qualifying positions. The results are: JQuery: 4 Prototype / Scriptaculous: 3 Yahoo! UI: 1 ExtJS: 1 Dojo: 1 Given my small sample size, I don't think these results are quite as conclusive. - David Email Disclaimer: http://www.co.marin.ca.us/nav/misc/EmailDisclaimer.cfm