The development team that I lead is standardizing on Zend Framework (http://www.framework.zend.com) as a development platform. This category of posts will be dealing with the issues that we are running into, and how we are solving them, to help alleviate other people’s pain.

We have reviewed a number of platforms, but essentially narrowed it down to three, Zend, CakePHP (http://cakephp.org/) and Symfony (http://www.symfony-project.org/) . Symfony fell out of the running due to the steep learning curve and CakePHP due to the tough integration with other frameworks like Doctrine (http://doctrine-project.org/) that we use as an ORM

The journey is going to be interesting since we are going to port our home-grown solutions to Zend, since we have thrown all the chips into their corner.

The major selling points for Zend Framework are:

– Large array of classes

– Object oriented approach

– Loosely coupled components

The major issues that we anticipate going in are going to be performance related, since Zend Framework is one of the slowest out there due to its flexibility

Well every journey begins with a single step and a leap of faith