Question

I am interested in learning Zend Framework 2.x, and I’ve noted that there are many good books written about ZF 1.8, 1.9, etc… however, I haven’t come across any that explicitly states it is for ZF2 (except for one, and it was written in German).

In order to learn ZF, I could sit an learn it through the documentation… however, that sounds rather unsavory, despite the fact that it contains the latest information and arguably is the “best” source. I would like to endeavor in the more abundant sources on versions 1.8 or 1.9 as I learn this framework.

How much overlap is there between 1.8/1.9 to 2.x? I know 2.x uses namespaces and many new PHP 5.3.x features, but are there really that many changes between the implementation of these versions that I would be wasting my time trying to learn anything less than 2.0?

I’m aware that even if there is a large amount of compatibility, I would still have to come back and fill in a few “knowledge gaps”. I’m just looking for a quick run down of the framework overall.

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

Zend Framework 2 is very different from ZF1. It’s core has been rewritten and the MVC structure has changed quite a bit.

The blog post announcing ZF2 goes into some detail on what has changed and why so I would recommend reading that. If you haven’t used ZF1 extensively, you won’t know some of the components they are talking about but that’s okay. But as it states, ZF2 will look alien to those familiar with ZF1. Part of this is the new MVC structure and there are many new core components not available before including the ModuleManager, ServiceManager, and EventManager which provide better ways of accomplishing tasks that were more abstract to accomplish in ZF1.

Unless you plan on working with ZF1 projects, there isn’t much sense in learning it at this point; I’d jump right into learning ZF2 at this point. If you were to learn ZF2 now and come across a ZF1 application down the road, there will be things you run into you aren’t familiar with but largely you should be able to understand what’s going on and get in and edit the application and learn what you need to know as you go.

Since the libraries provided by ZF1 and ZF2 are able to be used standalone, it would be possible to use some ZF2 classes in ZF1 as long as those classes aren’t too tightly coupled to other classes in ZF2. For example, you can use Zend\Crypt from ZF2 standalone quite easily, but trying to use Zend\Form might be a different story since its tied to views, validators, filters and other classes.

As for learning ZF2, like you said there aren’t many books around yet since its so new, but there are a lot of resources available for learning it aside from the reference guide.

I’d recommend looking at Getting Started with ZF2, the ZF2 Skeleton App, as well as the Zend Webinars where you can already find some great ZF2 tutorials including a presentation called Getting Started with ZF2 presented by The Zend Framework project lead Matthew Weier O’Phinney. There’s also an upcoming webinar about MVC that’s worth registering for (its free).

Hope that answers your question!