Is it good idea to use Zend Framework in medium scale enterprise website?

Question

Though this thread recommends using it, I've few concerns:

I started with Zend Framework 1.6 like 8 months ago. Now they've released 1.10. So they're releasing new version in every 2 months.

There are several things which have been drastically changed (like bootstrap class in main application folder, it wasn't there earlier. It was simply a php file, AFAIR). Several functions in Zend_DB (and probably other modules as well) has been replaced and it's recommended not to use older functions.

Doctrine integration is far from complete.

As they've mentioned, newly introduced Namespace (php 5.3 namespaces) is gonna change a lot of thing as well. and so on...

So, my question is..

Is it worth using Zend Framework now and update code in every 2 months? Or One should wait until a more stable, less frequently changing version is available?

EDIT

If someone like me is already using it, what would be best approach to keep Zend Framework updated?

Answer 1

Please see my accepted answer to this related question

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2140823/is-zend-framework-stable/2140883#2140883

Keep in mind that you do not have to update your version each time Zend updates ZF. And you also do not have to use each and every feature. Because ZF is a glue framework, you can utilize components from it it as you see fit. If you don't want to use Zend_Application, then keep your bootstrap.

Also, when updating, you can checkout only portions of the code from their SVN and patch your installation partially, thereby creating your own version of ZF. Like I said, many components can be used standalone and have no dependencies on other componentes in ZF. Thus, you could very much use a 1.10 Zend_DB, while keeping a 1.8 Zend_Log.

Answer 2

I've been working on a project for about 1.5 years now, that uses ZF and we are running against trunk. For the whole period I had to freeze 4 or 5 times to a revision because of bugs (that got resolved in a few days) and that's basically all the problems I had. All 1.x releases of ZF are backward-compatible. So, yes, go ahead and use it.

In regards to Doctrine - we use it, and while it's very good, it is the weakest link in out stack. Don't get me wrong - it's a very good project, but it simply tries to do way too many things at once.