In this short video, Zend Principal Engineer and PHP expert Matthew Weier O’Phinney discusses the often-asked question, “Is Zend Framework dead?” He also discusses the transition from Zend Framework to Laminas, and the availability of Apigility and Expressive technologies under the Laminas project.
Is Zend Framework Dead?
No, Zend Framework is not dead. It has essentially been rebranded as the Laminas Project under the Linux Foundation. The code is available today. All of the versions from 2.0 forward of the Zend Framework project, including Zend MVC applications. Additionally, all of Apigility and Expressive are now available as Laminas API Tools and Mezzio – both of which can be migrated today and have them production ready.
A lot of people had been postulating that Zend Framework was dead the last few years, which is completely not true. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
We started a project to measure our metrics in 2017, and, at the time, we measured our total lifetime downloads at around 140,000,000. That’s a lot! What’s even better is that by the end of the year, we had doubled that. And every nine months, we’re adding another 140,000,000 to our lifetime downloads.
That number is really interesting, because when you look at the total download for other top frameworks, like Symfony, the total downloads are within about 100,000,000 per year. Which is fantastic. The next closest framework is about 80,000,000 behind us. As a result, you can see that we have a lot of popularity and a lot of people are using it, it’s just that aren’t necessarily talking about it.
And that’s something we want to change by moving it into the Linux Foundation. Our goal is to get more people interested and evangelizing it and using it, and having people talking about what they’re building with Laminas, and telling others that it’s a great tool to solve all of your PHP application problems.
Additional Resources
Want to learn more about Laminas, and options for support and migration services provided by Zend? The resources below are a good place to start.
- What Is Laminas?
- Evolution of Zend Framework to Laminas Project
- Laminas Migration Services
- What Is Laminas Enterprise Support by Zend?
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