Choose Zend OR Symfony? And why? [closed]

Question

I know this has been done many times before (some posts are really old so would be nice to get feedback based on current state of play), but I would like people's advice on which framework to use for a new application that we are about to start developing.Though we have set-up everything according to ZEND but now client's investor need to know why we choose Zend.

It was selected on the bases, out of 5 developers 2 are familiar with Zend. Now client want a detailed explanation why we didn't choose Symfony over Zend. Our reason is not enough to support our selection ;) so help me to choose which framework has what advantages over other so that we can present him solid reasons(for zend), and if symfony has more +ves then why we choose it(symfony) NOW. We can change our framework now.

I guess the correct answer is 'depends on what you're application and you're own requirements/preferences' so here is a brief description of the application and some of our own requirements:

The Application:

A financial transaction system extracting live transactions data done over thousands/millions of POS world-wide.

Few important things for project:

1. Database is already provided to us & it is an ORACLE database.

2. Oracle database has more than 86 tables. Some of the tables have more than 60000 rows of data at present & some of them have 79 columns too.

Our Requirements:

• good support for jQuery
• allow easy output of different types of output (HTML, XML, JSON)
• easy UI development using in-bulit functions/methods.
• ACL
• fairly fast development (as always, schedule is tight)
• nice clean business logic layer with freedom to architect the solution as we like.
• a framework that helps you to get stuff done quickly but doesn't restrict you too much.
• a good platform for doing other projects.

Any feedback from people who have used these frameworks (specially those who have used both) would be much appreciated.

Zend is not compulsion, but if changed to symfony, we need support for that. So support your answers with reasons, links.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Why Zend

First of all, I had my good experience over working with Zend Framework. It is most stable framework over all the php RAD Frameworks. Zend provides you jQuery builtin Class as Helper that will make it easy for you to make jQuery usage most easy. Even though, it provides the best usage with Dojo too. ZendX_jQuery class makes it easy for you to make use jQuery whenever you want. And, as you know jQuery allows ajax calls by $.ajax*() so it would be perfect choice for going through client side scripting.

However, I'll focus over the zend too because you can go through writing your API for most of the common transactions all over the site. As, ZEND provides Using AjaxContext with Zend_Rest_Controller and Zend_Rest_Route classes for this purpose that holds the Ajax context.

Zend has the best cache system. Even though, it provides the perfect search indexing using lucene. It is easy and stable to make your own re-usable component in your class library. CLI makes your structure delightful so no need to make everything manually.

No problem of managing templates. Action loads its view by prefix. View doesn't bounds you to have any templating engine. However, you can go through that too.

Layouts capability makes it extremely perfect to make generic and dynamic layouts that would be based over different of the controllers based upon ACL. And by ACL, i also got that Zend_Acl provides the complete solution over implementing out the ACL services. ACL is ofcourse the mandatory thing in your application.

Zend also provides you ability of having the modular structure of your site. Just plug and play your code snippets.

Why Symfony

I never gone too much deep over the symfony. However, I experienced it before for one of my project. Overall, as comparing, zend has decent folder structure then symfony. Symfony provides you ability to your code snippets but those snippets are known as bundle here. It has some templating styles that you need to implement in your views. It didn't found any built-in core library for implementing jQuery dynamically. May be, I would be wrong here but I don't know about it yet!.

I also got the same situation when I need to compare Zend & Symfony. But, after looking over all the aspects, I decided to go through the Zend.