Web Development Magazine

Zend Framework 1.0 finally relased

On 2nd of July stable Zend framework was released. We have been waiting for a very long for that to happen, mainly because Zend is the biggest company involved in PHP development and their every product is something that can really improve programmers work, however most of them are commercial, you need to spend some cash to get them, but Zend Framework is free for all and it is available for download at www.zend.framework.com.

When it comes to PHP disadvantages, one of the biggest is lack of default framework, every other server side script language has got one, so it is always good to hear that new framework for PHP is released, especially open source.

Zend framework was created with a help of 230 developers from many countries, this includes not only individual developers but big corporations like IBM and Google as well, so i guess there is huge potential in Zend Framework.

People behind this project claim, it can be used in a wide range of web applications from simple web applications like weblogs, to integrated corporate ecommerce systems.

Zend Framework is open source project and can be very easy adopted to commercial use, because it is released under BSD license which enables users to use this product in their commercial applications.

At the beginning of this article i wrote that lack of framework is one of the biggest disadvantages of PHP, but now as i think of it, it is may be advantage as well, because probably none of programming languages has a such wide range of frameworks to choose from.

Some are good some are not, today the biggest two players in PHP frameworks field are Zend Framework and CakePHP, both have similar web development features and both are really good.

If you are not using any framework yet, then you should consider trying one of them or even better try both of them and then go with the one that suits you best. However if you are already using some kind of framework, wrote by you or not, then it is better to stick to it, because learning to use new framework takes a lot of time. On the other hand if you will learn to use high quality framework like Zend or PHPcake then you can save a lot of time later, so decision is up to you.

As we now have stable version of Zend Framework i will soon write an article on how to get started with it and another article on how to get started with PHPcake. I hope this articles will make it easier for you to learn basics of both this powerful frameworks.