I've been a web developer for the past 8 years (although I'd only consider the second half of that time as real experience)
In the past year I've done a couple of Zend Framework based business applications and I've been able to get comfortable with it.
Now I have been offered a position for leading a start-up on the technical side, I'm pretty excited as I am given freedom to make crucial decisions and am encourage to use new technologies to make our product 'cutting edge'.
So my question to you more experienced guys are: Is it worth picking up ZF2? Will the transition of learning the new ways be easy? How much does the coding style change? Can one start with the current available version and rely that the future releases will be compatible? Are the benefits of ZF2 vs 1 great enough to justify investing my time into adopting when faced with a job such as mine? Are there more important questions I should be asking?
Thanks, all advice greatly appreciated :)
UPDATE Zend Framework 2 Stable released http://framework.zend.com/blog/zend-framework-2-0-0-stable-released.html
ZF2 is not ready yet and will not be stable before mid-2011 I think. There will be a lot of changes but the coding style will stay the same. So stick with 1.X for the moment.
Most important feature of ZF2 is namespacing. There is also some effort in autoloading and fastening the dispatch process. Even though I don't think that's a good idea to adopt ZF2 right now. I'd suggest sticking with stable 1.X until the release of ZF2 stable. even after first stable version there will be many improvements in the first months, so I guess that 3 to 6 months after first stable is good time for "real life" usage... so its NO from me :)
For stability time is needed. In first releases there will be many updates in short periods. So I don;t think it will be good for enterprise production. Maybe next summer ;)