I’ve ditched the Zend Framework on a project. In it’s place, Symfony has allowed me to recreate all the work with the Zend Framework over several months in a matter of 4 hours.
The Zend Framework proved to be:
- too piecemeal
- incomplete – arguably this is represented by the version number; but this applied to both individual components being incomplete and the lack of a complete offering for a whole application
- in flux – changing each time we updated such that it was difficult to get the newer components without breaking lots of our code
- too rigid – we found it far too rigid and requiring much code diving, without much direction, to redirect some of the logic especially in the Controller framework
All in all, Symfony has proved very easy to use, and has many facets and components I haven’t yet even been able to take advantage of.
I do not want to over defend the Zend Framework but it seems that all the problems you went through come from its preview release status.
[...] David Rasch on why he ditched the Zend Framework [...]
Some of these are absolutely a function of the framework being in preview. However, as I see the framework getting closer to a 1.0, the convergence I’d hope to see is minimal. I think it comes down to the Zend Framework set out to be a cool set of classes, with limited contributors. Ultimately, it’s going to be the same as PEAR–a great resource for modules when you need them, but you’ll need something else if you’re looking for a real Framework.