Any chance you could correct it?

I have to totally agree with Ethan here. Everyone seems to have ****-on for ZF. I dont hate it but its definitely not as polished and lacks a lot of the tools SF has. Id say the two are equally as complex. But SF’s out of the box dev tools make this a lot less intimidating/time draining when you first get started. Allowing for a good working pace on a real project as youre learning.

My main complaints about Zend are:

- .ini is the default config format – you can use XML but you have to set it up yourself, and there is no YAML support built in. To make matters worse there is no direct example of how to map things from ini to xml – granted its pretty straight forward but there are a couple gotchas.

-Rampant use of complex array structures as arguments. Ok, ill admit in a lot of place this is to support DI, and is totally beneficial but in some places it is not at all desireable… the Zend url view helper comes to mind. Its ok to parse out of strings for simple things…

- Its a use at will framework – which is great if you need to keep things small and/or have small objectives. However there is no built in tooling feature to help you manage what you actually need to deploy. This is made worse by the fact that that they seem to include EVERYTHING in the core… Gdata, InfoCard, OpenId, etc.. They should be in ZendX, or there should be some kind of plugin system or build manager to exclude the cruft without manual tracking.

- Along with the previous their package layout makes it impossible to svn:external into a project the packages you want. You either external all of the standard and/or extras library or you put what you need directly in SVN. So annoying… but hey at least they arent using GIT without an SVN mirror.

Finally, i agree with Robert Speer the competition and new ideas are going to make all frameworks better.

And of course how the other frameworks respond, because competition and new ideas are going to make all frameworks better.

Also if I was totally fair and objective this would not be the internet that we all know and love

I understand many of your points. I also want to point out that many of your criticisms are unfairly tainted by your familiarity with Symfony — if you are fluent in one framework, you’ll of course be able to do things faster and easier with it than with a framework with which you are unfamiliar. You blast the ZF 30-minute tour as not meaning you can write the code in 30 minutes (true, but that was never a claim), and go on to show how you developed equivalent functionality in symfony in just over 2 hours — which is approximately how long it took a fluent ZF developer to write the ZF quickstart (the code written took around 2 hours, most of which was spent on testing the DataMapper displayed in the examples).

I also agree fully with you that we need more work with model generation and CRUD screens. This is one area where we definitely lag. That said, I also think we pose one advantage over other frameworks in precisely this area, because we do not explicitly tie these operations to the database. I personally feel this is an area where many frameworks “get it wrong”, as tying models to the database prevents developers from looking at the bigger picture where data persistence may be happening on a middle tier or via a 3rd party web service, and the database is nowhere present in the web-facing application. If and when we offer model and CRUD generation, one requirement will be that the models are de-coupled from the actual data persistence to allow for these increasintly common situations. (With the release of Zend_Tool, CRUD generation will be coming sooner rather than later.)

Bill Karwin notes that we do not have anyone on the ZF team actively maintaining Zend_Db. This, actually, is not true, and those users of Zend_Db will have noticed a ton of fixes and improvements in the past 2 months (most of which released with 1.9.0). Ralph Schindler, one of our engineers, is also not shy about reaching out to known DB experts to get opinions and guidance for those areas in which he is less familiar.

On the ORM front, as beberlei noted, he is working on an Entity/DataMapper framework for ZF that has many similarities to Doctrine2. Additionally, I am in discussions with ZF contributors and Doctrine developers regarding the possibility of offering more formal ties between our two projects — which would give ZF two choices for ORM functionality, and allow developers fluent with Doctrine to migrate to ZF very quickly and easily. (I myself have been using Doctrine fairly extensively with a number of projects recently, and enjoy the fact that it helps reduce the amount of custom code I need to write.) As part of these efforts, I hope to dedicate some time to form generation from entities — a task that, as you note, can also be tedious. This should not be terribly difficult, as most form metadata necessary will already be part of the entity definitions.

Regarding plugins, one way in which ZF differs from other frameworks is that contributors tend to contribute their plugins back to the project, instead of offering them separately. This is in part due to the fact that we do not have a “forge” site (yet) for ZF where people can post their plugins, but also due to the fact that we encourage contributions to the project itself. As a result, I feel you overlooked the fact that we have many, many dozens (potentially hundreds) of plugins throughout the framework — look at the quantity of action helpers, validators, filters, decorators, adapters, and view helpers if you need proof.

Thank you for taking the time to post this critique, and I urge you to keep evaluating ZF with each new minor release — and keep us honest by pointing out where we need improvement.

I have to say that learning process is quite long but once you finished – you will be happy that you have invested your time in something what is worth it.
Today good framework is a must. There is nothing to stop you to build whatever you want if you are using symfony.

Highly recommended framework but not to novice in PHP. First you need to know how to do 1000s things…. by handcoding
Documentation is great anyway.

Without symfony I rather change my web language to different. But now I love it again.

Happy coding