ASP.Net MVC or Zend Framework. What is your opinio

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I am looking to start a new project and I am trying to decide which framework to go with. I have been using ASP.Net for a while and enjoy it. My first introduction to web applications was with PHP and I still love it. The project should be a medium sized project maintained by 1 or 2 developers with a potential to grow. The only pros and cons are can think of are as follows:

ASP.Net MVC Pros

• Big community support and increasing
• Seems to be fully featured

Cons

• Getting a dedicated server will be expensive.
• A licensed version of SQL Server will be expensive

Zend Framework Pros

• Also a fairly large community
• Free, using the typical LAMP setup

Cons

• Not as mainstream
• Might contain possible limitations

Lastly, I have enjoyed working with ASP.Net's concept of Master pages. Does ASP.Net MVC still support this and does Zend Framework have something similar. I think that Zend offers something called templating and it looks close to Master pages.

What is your opinion?

Answer 1

Choose Symfony and use ZF components inside it :) Sf has awesome documentation to read, rich community + features. Sf just embeds many open source tools well inside it like Twig, Doctrine, Unit Testing, Asset optimization tools (Uglify JS, YUI compressor), Swiftmailer, Monolog ...

Answer 2

I think ZF has more going for it based on your requirements. The cons you've listed against ZF are rather subjective, but the cost of ASP.NET is definite.

There's definitely a rich community working on Zend Framework and its 1.0 release came well over a year ago, so it's stable and reliable.

Zend Framework supports a two step view, where a view template is rendered inside a layout template. I think this satisfies your need for master pages.

It seems you have equal love for PHP and ASP. If I was making the decision, I'd work with whatever I'm most confident using, or which would be most relevant for the future.

Answer 3

i am also deciding between the 2 + Ruby on Rails ...

i am using Zend Framework 1.8.2 and like it (started abt ~3 mths ago). its learning curve is steep. but i now quite like it. apart from MVC it has Zend_Forms with allows me to even separate the "input" logic and validation with is nice.

templating is achieved through Zend_Layouts and Zend_View. i dunno how to change layouts yet (now i have the whole site using the same layout ...) but i think its possible.

but after Zend Framework for a while i know is hard and now is exploring if theres any better frameworks .. so ASP.NET MVC and Ruby on Rails

1st impression on ASP.NET MVC is ok maybe need to know how they do forms and validation. apart from that ... i feel LINQ is GREAT!

for Ruby on Rails i like the auto generation of Models and Forms at the same time. speed things up alot but need to know whether customization of these auto generated forms will be easy. watched a screencast at the official site and incorporating AJAX seems easy .

Answer 4

I've tried both Zend Framework and ASP.NET MVC, and my impression is that ASP.NET MVC is the easiest to develop with. ZF takes a lot of time to learn and it also takes too much time (in my opinon) to set up. ZF also limits you in many cases, making you build large workarounds for things that ought to be implemented by default in the framework. Many of the libraries ZF offers are also made for very specific use cases, and are difficult to customize.

With ASP you can have an application up and running in no time. Any changes you want to make to the default setup is richly documented. You also have the advantage of a 'real' programming language like C#. The MVC pattern combined with a real programming language makes it easy to unit test, especially good if you're into test driven developement. My pros list of ASP.NET MVC is:

• Easy localization and globalization with the .NET framework
• Master Pages is much easier to use and more flexible than the layout model in ZF
• You get all the good things from ASP.NET like SiteMap and the like
• Linq
• Microsoft Entity Framework / NHibernate / Spring.NET

About the cost of the server and the SQLServer, many hosting companies provide dedicated servers at fairly decent prices.

Answer 5

I am working on .net for 3 years. .net framework has some cons such as expensive cost of database and host. But you can use ms sql express which has a free license. The problem with .net is: It doesn't have an active community like php, which is so important! For years I had this problem whenever I needed a component, I had to search a lot for a free version of a component. However in php everything is free! But in general I think developing software in .net is faster and easier because when you are coding and designing, this is VS that is doing most of things for you. And especially coding in .net keep you away from most of details because it has a very nice abstraction.

Answer 6

As a developer I think it is more abt asp.net and php. I know asp.net more than php, so I will suggest asp.net. Also you can't have power of linq with php,which is a very big advantage.

Zend has been here from some time, Asp.net MVC is still new. What I have seen is that alot developers are more comfortable with traditional methods than MVC.

MS has open sourced MVC, so its community will grow for sure.