I'm a hundred percent with the author on this—most PHP frameworks and libraries are a ridiculous mess. My requirement for using third-party libraries are that they do a single thing, that they do it well, and that they have little or no dependencies. There's no good reason why most third-party code can't be a single class / file.
Our third-party library stack for the (very complex) chartboost.com architecture is made up of simple, modular parts: Paraglide as micro-MVC (one class, and a handful of folder for the base structure), MongoModel (one class, as MongoDB ORM), etc. Most of our third-party libraries are very simple and manageable, the way all PHP should be.
As for code verbosity: everything is auto-loaded on the fly when needed. Our code has practically no `require` statements. We just follow a simple conventions of where to place files and how to name classes, and everything works smoothly and painlessly.
Most importantly in this setup, none of the libraries depend on the framework of choice or on anything architectural. The framework doesn't even require being run in a web environment. This lets us do powerful and flexible things like use Facebook's `phpsh` library to open up a shell that will have our entire environment available and loaded on the fly. We can also switch between dev, production or local environments on the fly.
Our third-party library stack for the (very complex) chartboost.com architecture is made up of simple, modular parts: Paraglide as micro-MVC (one class, and a handful of folder for the base structure), MongoModel (one class, as MongoDB ORM), etc. Most of our third-party libraries are very simple and manageable, the way all PHP should be.
As for code verbosity: everything is auto-loaded on the fly when needed. Our code has practically no `require` statements. We just follow a simple conventions of where to place files and how to name classes, and everything works smoothly and painlessly.
Most importantly in this setup, none of the libraries depend on the framework of choice or on anything architectural. The framework doesn't even require being run in a web environment. This lets us do powerful and flexible things like use Facebook's `phpsh` library to open up a shell that will have our entire environment available and loaded on the fly. We can also switch between dev, production or local environments on the fly.