Why the Zend Framework

[armandop]

Hey everyone.

I was curious why everyone chose the Zend Framework and not say CakePHP or symfony.

The reason for me was that the framework was a Zend product and felt it would take based on that alone in large corporations. I know not a very technical reason lol.

[Eugen]

now youll see a debate
im using zend because my company decidet so..

cakephp is still running on php4 so dont even think about it, and as far symfony goes i cant really say because i didnt try it but i heard some good think about it..

[SirAdrian]

CakePHP will force you into its own conventions which means it does everything for you. If you want that, then it suits you. Most of the people here chose Zend because of its flexibility and power. It's more suited towards enterprise apps versus CakePHP which is suited towards CRUD apps or blog tutorials (over simplification).

[Tekerson]

For me it was that it pretty much fits with the way I think, so that made learning it easier. As well as the flexibility, the use-at-will architecture (even though we use the whole stack anyway) and the support of Zend is also a plus, as it means it will be more likely to have consistent updates and improvements.

[Rhino]

I use it also because my company picked it. At first I preferred CodeIgniter or Kohana over ZF because they are a lot simpler but the more I use Zend the more I like it...it's quite a bit more powerful and secure than CI, if a bit more complicated, and once you get used to it it gets a lot more intuitive. I wish it had a robust events model like Kohana does but it turns out that you can do a lot of the same stuff with plugins and action helpers. As for the "training wheels" frameworks like symfony, drupal, cakephp etc those are good for building a very focused site but I don't think they are really robust enough to use in an enterprise-level implementation

[risoknop]

Well I'm using Zend because I like the freedom it gives you. It doesn't force conventions on you, you can write the code the way you are used to.

[Cirdan]

I use Zend because it is really the only framework I learned. I like the flexibility of Zend. It was easy for me to learn and to adapt to my needs.

[Regx]

I used to be a CoreIgniter fan, but since I've been working with Zend Framework, its the only one I'm still working with.
I like its extensibility, flexibility and the fact that is is written in strict PHP5.

[bizhat]

I too looking for information on advantages of zend.

Don't you think Zend Framework make application slow as it need many things loaded on each request ?

The Zend Quick start looks very difficult for me. I followed CI getting started tutorial with out much difficulty. I am trying to get started with ZF as it is supported in Zend Studio.

[Qaaolchoura]

As mentioned previously, many of the most popular frameworks support php 4, at a high cost to good OO practices (though I looked at Akelos despite this). And every review of Symfony warns that it's very slow (in terms of prcoessing, development looks like a piece of cake). I've read that Yii is the fastest framework, but it's got some documentation issues (And by setting up your application for you, it makes it harder to debug configuration issues).

The main reason I'm giving Zend another shot is the powerful, well documented Auth and Acl modules. Authorization especially is essential to what I'm trying to do, so I need solid modules with clear instructions.

Flexibility is also essential--the only framework I'd say is more flexible than Zend is Kohana, and the documentation there is often deficient, especially for its Auth+Acl module. As mentioned before (even if it didn't support PHP 4) Cake PHP is very rigid. And CI doesn't even have a frickin' Auth module.

Zend has some other really nice things: Zend_Services, Zend_Gdata, and Zend_Search_Lucene for example, but that's all very much a secondary consideration.