I've ditched the Zend Framework on a project. In it's place, Symfony has allowed me to recreate all the work with the Zend Framework over several months in a matter of 4 hours.

The Zend Framework proved to be:

  • too piecemeal
  • incomplete - arguably this is represented by the version number; but this applied to both individual components being incomplete and the lack of a complete offering for a whole application
  • in flux - changing each time we updated such that it was difficult to get the newer components without breaking lots of our code
  • too rigid - we found it far too rigid and requiring much code diving, without much direction, to redirect some of the logic especially in the Controller framework

All in all, Symfony has proved very easy to use, and has many facets and components I haven't yet even been able to take advantage of.