Zend Framework was a PHP framework developed by Zend Technologies and acquired by Rogue Wave Software. The Laminas Project is the community managed Open Source Continuation of Zend Framework managed by the Linux Foundation. Transition initiated after Rogue Wave was acquired by Perforce in 2019.
CakePhp is useful if you need to implement a code with different modules (users, payments, pictures). CakePhp is useless if you need to build a quick project that requires a few lines of codes, it's faster to reuse and adapt code from old projects.
Zend Framework is well suited for large (or potentially large) software projects. It has the tools and structures for organizing and maintaining millions of lines of code by providing different scaffolding and service management capabilities. Obviously, it works well in environments that prefer a traditional PHP-based MVC stack as that is how it's designed. For smaller or less experienced teams, it might be faster to build something using a simpler framework such as Laravel or Symfony because the learning curve is a bit less steep. The routing system of Zend Framework is incredibly powerful but also very hard to get right, for example. Overall, however, being skilled with Zend Framework 2 will be very advantageous.
The Zend Framework excels at productivity. It's lightweight, loosely-coupled enough to provide 90% of the functionality that everyone needs out of the door, but also customizeable enough to meet the remaining 10% should your business need it.
Because the Zend Framework is functionality focused (also supported by the actual PHP developers) - it is light enough to hit the ground running with. Having no configuration files to get rolling is also a huge plus.
The documentation of the Zend Framework is reliable, updated & succint. I have not encountered an issue that I could not easily troubleshoot from looking at the documentation.
The biggest issue inherit in CakePHP, and why we switched to Laravel, is the base configuration of the program. Most people aree that CakePHP uses old (outdated, even dangerous) PHP habits. There is some truth in this: Cake has not been as quick to adapt to the newer PHP versions as they should. I was always surprised that with new major releases, from 2.4 to 2.5 for example, that the minimum version of PHP will never increase. For example, CakePHP only requires version 5.2.8 of PHP, but it would not have been difficult to update the minimum version at least 5.3 when adapting a new version.
Speed - our company had many issues scaling CakePHP to a medium size application software, even with using REDIS/memcache we would still run into many issues with the built-in ORM.
I absolutely love Zend Framework. However we are using Zend Framework 1 and when we get to the point that we need to go Zend Framework 2 (for PHP namespacing) I may explore other frameworks. When we chose Zend it was the best option for us. I'd like to see if maybe there's a better fit that doesn't have the same complicated overhead of Zend Framework
Zend is very usable once you learn how to use it. I've had moments where I thought what I want to do isn't possible but I've learned I haven't looked in the correct place yet. Zend is a Catch-22. It's very usable once you know how to use it. But I strongly feel it's worth learning
Zend Framework has the best (paid) support and ecosystem I've ever seen in a PHP framework. The company has developed many products, including Zend Server, Zend Debugger, and an Eclipse-based IDE that extends the framework to create an entire development platform that can improve developer productivity and software quality while maintaining the clean architecture that characterizes the framework.
It isn't the fastest but is one of the faster available. It's the only one currently supported actively by the PHP team itself. You might find more classes in Symfony for instance, but in the end, most of the core files will be supported above Zend classes either by extension or by encapsulation. The only con that I see is the learning curve required to adopt this framework, and the amount of additional work you will have to do to build PHP based apps with it.
