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I apologise in advance as this is not stricltly a coding question, but, I wanted to canvass as wide a spectrum of opinion as possible.

I have been using hte Zend php stack (among others) for some years now mainly because htey offer the best ORACLE support and they offer commercial support which keeps my corporate clients happy (middle managers just love to spend!).

However recently I have been hit by two gotchas in a very short space of time. Firstly they dropped AIX support with no notice (I checked the version I wanted was available, checked the right version of Oracle was supported etc. two weeks later I went to download and lo - no AIX version). Secondly I was installing in a Windows 2003 server and the install hung, when googled the problem I discovered several people had the same problem going back to early 2008 -- but no solution was forthcoming.

Is it worth bothering with Zend anymore?

Charles
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James Anderson
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1 Answers1

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Personally I'm not interested in needs of business circles, but I have a humble opinion about Zend as a hobby coder if you're interested.

I had a quite deep investigation about PHP frameworks lately and reviewed the most popular one. Of course, big companies chose Zend Framework because of infinite requirements.

If you haven't managed to look at this framework, do so. You will find a big mass of ugly code which planned to be perfect in terms of programming habits, but in the end, it. just. doesn't. cut. it.

Zend is shown as the PHP company. They might know what PHP is, but have no idea what a company is.

pestaa
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  • The main reasons I ended up choosing Zend reviously were good Oracle support and good AIX support. AIX just pain disappeared and Oracle have simplified/standardised thier ODBC drivers so its not such a pain to connect from a vanilla php. I looked at the Zend framework and though - "J2EE v1.0 refactored as php Aaaaaargh!" – James Anderson May 18 '09 at 01:10
  • Of course, they have a far huuuge list of features. And that seems appealing. But ultimately, Zend products are not produced for using. They are created to be bought. – pestaa May 21 '09 at 19:54
  • I was a Zend Framework developer when it was in its infancy and really have to say that most of what is said here is right. It went from a solid, well defined framework compared to PEAR's random hodgpoge of libraries into a bloated, J2EE refactored as PHP as @JamesAnderson said above. The original idea was a well abstracted, solid toolset and turned into a bloated want-to-be turnkey solution for CIO's to feel better about choosing PHP. – colinross May 24 '11 at 08:23