Laminas Project Reviews and Ratings

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Zend Framework is used in two systems at my former company. One system has been designed and implemented as a Zend Framework MVC application with version 1.x. It has been live and running for over 10 years, and it still runs Zend Framework version 1.x as is still supported and working well. The other system uses Zend Framework as a vendor library, to consume several utility classes as PDF management or some cryptographic implementation.

Likelihood to Recommend

<div>Zend Framework is great, and one of the best, to be used as an external library to benefit from its multiple classes for everything without having to create the entire application on top of the framework. That makes it super easy to plug into any existing PHP project and start using it. It offers two different ways to architect new applications, which may suit most developers around. One is based on the MVC pattern, and the other is based in composition and middleware, which has a more functional approach that's becoming more popular. </div><div>

</div><div>It may not be the best tool for a simple app or a quick prototype, but it has improved on that side lately. Tooling can also improve, there are other frameworks that have developed their tooling ecosystem to increase developer productivity.

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Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Zend PHP Engine is used by my organization as the backbone framework to debug our PHP environments. We utilize its API functions to monitor API calls, XHR requests, MYSQL calls & other various functionality in our LAMP stack environment.

Likelihood to Recommend

Zend PHP Engine is well suited for small/medium sized projects that require heavy PHP development. It is especially potent in developing API's &amp; debugging your entire web application from inception to scale. Zend PHP engine is obviously less well suited for scenarios where you need more advanced dynamic monitoring &amp; development for web-apps at huge scale.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Zend PHP framework in my opinion is the default framework for any PHP based project. It's supported by the core contributors of PHP and you will find that most of the major PHP frameworks rely on Zend classes.

Many developers won't choose to use Zend because compared to other frameworks it might be complicated, so you have a learning curve issue.

If you get to see some Symfony or Laravel classes, you will see that many of those extend Zend core classes. The reason why those other frameworks encapsulate Zend classes is because those are well built but are not so easy to use and you might add some value by extending them.

I have developed custom backend APIs by entirely using Zend, which makes those faster than using other more complex frameworks. For small or medium sized projects I would strongly suggest using Zend.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would say you can use Zend with any project of any size but in a personal experience I would recommend it more for small or medium sized projects. Since the code you will be writing with Zend has more verbosity than the one you can write with other frameworks, that might be a problem to maintain larger projects.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Zend Framework as the engine for our main site. I am the only one that manages it, but eBaum's World wouldn't run without it!

Likelihood to Recommend

Zend is well suited when you have a large, complicated site that will also need its own custom CMS. Zend doesn't get in the way and it's really easy to build exactly what you want, in a way that's consistent. It is not appropriate for a situation where you need something really fast. It definitely requires some leg work and configuration to get it up and running.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I've used Zend Framework at several different companies. Most companies I've worked for are still using Zend Framework 1.x, and usually in migration to either a different framework or Zend Framework 2.x. I have been looking at Zend Framework 3.x but have not used it in production software yet. This review is primarily for Zend Framework 2. If you're a company thinking about using Zend Framework, you should definitely focus on using Zend Framework 2 and not the much, much older Zend Framework 1 anymore. Zend Framework solves the problem of bootstrapping and sharing knowledge because there is already well-written documentation around the Zend Framework software library. If you try to build a proprietary framework from scratch, you'll be spending a lot of money and writing a lot of unnecessary documentation. Training and hiring is simpler - as you can find people who have experience with Zend Framework.

Likelihood to Recommend

Zend Framework is well suited for large (or potentially large) software projects. It has the tools and structures for organizing and maintaining millions of lines of code by providing different scaffolding and service management capabilities. Obviously, it works well in environments that prefer a traditional PHP-based MVC stack as that is how it's designed. For smaller or less experienced teams, it might be faster to build something using a simpler framework such as Laravel or Symfony because the learning curve is a bit less steep. The routing system of Zend Framework is incredibly powerful but also very hard to get right, for example. Overall, however, being skilled with Zend Framework 2 will be very advantageous.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Zend Framework is being used for the development of websites consuming an API.

Likelihood to Recommend