Following on from my previous article Breaking Up is Hard To Do its now time for me to also say goodbye to Zend Framework 1.x as well.

It too has served me well for a number of years, although the documentation gave me hours of frustration by reading the source I was able to get it to do what I wanted in a roundabout way.

It was never perfect and at times it felt bloated for what I was building which which were single locale applications but it was a reliable workhorse that rarely let me down and at the time I started using it I felt it was far superior to most other frameworks out there.

Now things are different, Symfony 2.x has really thrown down the gauntlet on what a framework should be, the disappointment I felt in the 1.x series of Symfony has been replaced with awe and respect for what they have done in the 2.x series.

Zend Framework will always have a special place in my heart from the early days when I had more time to be active and help out, and I have a fair amount of existing code that I will need to make sure is maintained in the short term until I can find time and reason to replace it so its not a final goodbye at this time. I will be focussing new development elsewhere however as I need to move on.

I’ll be sure to look in on ZF2 every now and again to see how its progressing, I just hope this time round documentation is given some focus when the coding is done. Just look at some of the examples given by Codeigniter and Symfony to see just what great documentation looks like.

Just like my previous post, this isn’t about “Symfony” is better than “Zend” so if your using “Zend” you suck, its about what framework is right for my requirements and my vision going forward, right now Symfony seems to just fit.