Several years ago a new framework called CakePHP was released and I was quick to jump on the band wagon. The promise of having base code that does 90% of the work for you was too tempting and we quickly got burned trying to perform more complex SQL queries – hitting the boundaries of what was possible and having to hack our way around it. Ugh.

Still, when you go back to writing an MVC style web app from the ground up you quickly realise that life would be much easier with a framework. A year or so after CakePHP I had a go with CodeIgniter and found it’s less strict Model paradigm easier to work with as you could just pass straight SQL to your database. Sure it lacked some features but it was easy to work with and easy to pick up.

Then I became freelance and did a bunch of work with WordPress, which I really like but it’s not a framework (though I do think it’s under-used and underrated).

So, as of August last year I started a new job where we use Zend Framework. My first impression was ‘wow, this is cool – very professional!’ 6 months in, and though I’ve not used it lots I think I can safely say it’s nothing like Cake or CI – it’s far more complicated, there are no walk through guides – you must invest good time learning it (something which there wasn’t time for me to do..)

I now know enough about ZF1 to get by, but last night I had a look at zend framework 2.. it appears as though a whole new level of complexity has been added. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out what the hell was going on and (for the time being) gave up!

I concluded a few things:

1. Zend Framework is a ‘nuts and bolts’ framework.. it feels much more like a bunch of helper classes to help you make your own framework. This is flexible, but complicated and time consuming.
2. Things that are complicated are more easy to break.
3. Zend Framework is nothing like the other frameworks out there. It takes a long time to develop good things.
4. The learning curve is steep. Steep enough to make you wonder if it makes any sense for a business to pursue it..imagine if all your future employees need to spend 2 months learning something before they can begin work?
5. Following on from 4 – if other companies/startups etc. aren’t using zend framework because it’s too time consuming for creating websites compared to other frameworks then does it make me valuable as someone who knows ZF? I guess you could look at this one in two lights really. In some ways it could make me more valuable!
6. One worrying thing about working with ZF1 was that different people on the team approached similar work in very different ways because of the flexibility ZF offers.. one person used Zend_Db_Table where another might use something else.. one person may have written a wrapper for something, put something in a library, a service or a base controller – things can quickly get out of hand.

Food for thought, but it’s becoming apparent that investing your time in one framework is a very serious thing to do.. everyone knows PHP, but when the frameworks become almost as complex as the language itself it becomes a serious investment of time for a web programmer.

I’d very much appreciate people’s comments on this 🙂

Please note: I’ll be revisiting this post on and off as I gain more experience with both ZF1 and ZF2 and I’ll be looking into other frameworks such as Yii and Symfony over the coming months.