Launched in 2006 by ZendTechnol ogi es, Inc - the company founded by the two
original authors of the Zend Engine - Zend Framework quickly gained traction to
become one of the better-known PHP frameworks. At the time of writing, it has been
adopted by a large number of companies and considerable parts of the community.
Some consider Zend Framework, and frameworks in general, to be bloated and
prefer their code custom-crafted for each task. Yet whenever development teams
grow in size and customer demands grow even faster, the need for a clear application
structure and code reusability becomes more urgent. This is where frameworks
come into play, along with coding guidelines, unit testing, automatic API documentation
and Continuous Integration systems. All of these techniques and their rise in
popularity are part of a tendency in the PHP world towards more mature development
practices, more mature teams and enterprise readiness.
Growing numbers of professional PHP developers use these techniques, taking
their code to the next level using frameworks like Zend Framework, Symfony, Solar,
Kohana, CakePHP and many, many others. Some of these frameworks are here to
stay, while some will eventually disappear, and yet others will grow to an even more
dominant position. Zend Framework, given its pedigree and the quality of the code,
is most likely here to stay.
