[eluser]usmc[/eluser]
Its funny that your university is pushing ZF. After spending some serious time working in it I now consider ZF to be an academic framework. On paper it looks great but in practice it is ridiculous. The reason it is ridiculous has less to do with the framework itself and more to do with its implementation.
Gripes:
Stop picking at it or it will bleed
It seems like every release modifies core functionality (or at least allows for yet another academic interpretation of it) without fixing the bugs that have existed for quite some time. Take Currency for example or the Zend Tool and how their latest attempt to support modules in a standard way is not supported on Zend Tool for windows. And yet they have time to change bootstrap and fork away from their initializer pattern negating much of the community documentation.
Poor documentation
There is a tremendous amount of documentation on the Zend Framework but the references never come together. Each reference for a particular piece of the ZF is a lesson in PHP OOP but it never points back to usage in the framework as a whole. This is where its strength is really its greatest weakness. Its abstract nature means every blogger with a theory can cook up a different flavor that may or may not be viable and can be dis-proven or argued against by another blogger with a different theory. As a new ZF developer since the documentation gives you no best practices you will need to research a great deal through google and then you will truly know insanity. Zend has essentially taken a stance protected by plausible deny-ability by not promoting any standard practice. They basically say you can't blame us if you interpreted this wrong since we never told you how to in the first place.
Reliance on caching
Zend Framework is a model of abstraction but also over-engineering. Zend knows that it is bloated but they always fall back to the same position "byte-code caching". Whenever there is an optimization problem they will insist that you should simply turn on their APC wrapper and everything will be fine. How sad.
I am certain that ZF will continue to spread like cancer. Most universities and businesses do not take anything seriously unless it is overly complicated.
