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Closed 9 years ago.
I've started using Zend Framework and Studio for my projects and would like to hear from those who already use it what to expect. I'm not interested so much in the good things because these can be marketing messages. I want to know about the things that are not so good or are annoying so I can decide for myself if they matter enough to me. Thanks for all your input.
Its a pretty good learning curve, with pretty limited (awful) documentation for most developers. Be prepared for that, as it will take most developers a good few weeks + to get a handle on it and how to do things "properly".
But I guess to say that will probably be the case with any framework. I just know that was a huge task to learn, and I am still learning. So doing something I have not done before with ZF, although I may have done this separately on another project, tends to take a bit more time.
Overhead. A lot of it. ZF is huge,
I'm using ZF for two years now and I'm quite happy with it. Just few things:
- documentation is good for beginners but in time you will see that it misses a lot
- don't use ZF without solution like APC / eAccelerator
- test everything carefully when you update to new version of ZF. Sometimes there are radical changes in ZF behaviour
I haven't used it for a while but it always used to have a bit of a memory overhead.
This was caused be the huge number of classes that the framework included for every request.
A couple of notes from my experience:
- Not well suited for rapid development ala Rails or Django
- No ORM
- When developers ignore the suggested "Zend" way of doing things it can get very messy
- It's not as loosely coupled as advertised. Just try making a Zend Framework MVC project without using Zend Loader.
- Slower than some other frameworks (but fast enough for 90% of websites, DB is almost always the bottleneck anyway)
- I've found the Zend Forms to be clunky and slow to implement
- Last I used it, the Zend_Feed_Writer class didn't seem to work right
