I recommend Zend Framework to the career PHP developer.

I know that there’s going to be a firestorm of disagreement or agreement if this post get’s any exposure but I am going to post it anyway. Many would shun me for naming a “best framework” for anything. From a career viewpoint, I have my reasons.

FrameworkPHP frameworks are everywhere. CakePHP, CodeIgniter, and symfony are just some samples of frameworks that have already sprouted and taken root. I’m not going to delve into the specifics of what each can do and what advantages one has over the other. There are numerous other sources that can provide better side-by-side comparisons and even benchmarks of all of the existing frameworks for PHP. I am going to make a recommendation from a career standpoint.

There are a huge number of PHP developers who are entirely independent and have no intentions or desire to get a desk job in a large corporation programming PHP and for that group of developers, feel free to totally ignore this post as it won’t make any sense from your perspective. For the rest of you who are, like me, developing PHP as a career, I will share my findings when it comes to frameworks. Regardless of which framework contains the most bells and whistles and shaves a few lines off your application, if you’re going to spend the time to learn a framework and become an expert, it had better benefit your career as well. It is with that reasoning that I make a framework recommendation.

Zend Framework LogoIn the present snapshot of the IT industry, PHP is steadily climbing as a legitimate candidate for larger IT shops. The quantity of PHP jobs increased substantially in just the past year. With certainty, developers who want to get the best of these jobs will need to keep pace with the industry and learn new skillets before they are requested within job postings. I cautiously approached issue of frameworks because I was not sure how the situation would unfold. With the completion of the Zend Framework, I feel it’s likely that this is a skill that will grant it’s early adopters an edge in the market.

Until recently, corporate PHP use has been generally limited to smaller projects, smaller companies, and smaller applications. As PHP use grows in larger projects and larger teams, the need for a framework because greater. So the simple question is: which framework will the industry adopt? While I can’t predict the future, I feel that the Zend Framework is by far the most likely choice from a corporate perspective. Companies will likely choose ZF because it is made by Zend, it has a large support community, it is likely better tested, and because Zend isn’t likely to go anywhere soon. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be groups using other frameworks on occasion, but I am predicting the choice of larger, establish companies as a general trend.

Zend Framework LogoAnother huge plus for Zend Framework is the specialties it contains with web services. Web services will undoubtedly be a firm part of the corporate future and ZF’s support for web services will only add to the case. This combined with the other basic reasons will surely make ZF the candidate of choice.

All that aside, ZF is pretty cool. It’s got a tremendous feature set, has a great syntax, and should improve the performance of any PHP dev team. Just as frameworks such as struts and tiles are prevalent in the J2EE world, the same trend will take hold as PHP becomes more acceptable to the larger groups. I recommend getting started with Zend Framework as I already have. If you start gaining experience with it now, you’ll be a step ahead of your competition when it really counts in the future.