ZendFramework 1—Reborn!

Why ZendFramework 1 Is Still Better Than Laminas

Beau Beauchamp
9 min readDec 12, 2021
Image by DepositEdhar via DepositPhotos

I’m part of the global community of developers who have been using ZendFramework since almost the very beginning.

My first experience with ZendFramework was around 2008, a few years after Zend had released it. In 2011, I got some deep hands-on experience with ZendFramework when I went to work for Disney during their massive NGE (Next Generation Experience) development effort.

I sat in a room with 200 other developers cranking out ZendFramework application code on the back lot of Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World. When we were on break, we literally just walked out of the building and around a corner and boom! we were in the park to play and relax for a while. It was a magical time.

ZendFramework is one of a number of PHP frameworks that have been around a while, nearly 20 years, much like CodeIgniter, CakePHP, and Symfony. But there was a reason why Disney engineers chose ZendFramework to build out our customer-facing sites. The framework is one of the few truly enterprise-class MVC frameworks in existence.

Feature Rich. Enterprise-class.

So what makes one framework “enterprise-class” and others not so much?

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Beau Beauchamp
Beau Beauchamp

Written by Beau Beauchamp

Technology entrepreneur. Web application architect. Paranormal sci-fi romance writer.