After 17 months of effort, hundreds of releases, tens of thousands of commits by hundreds of contributors, and millions of installs, we're pleased to announce the immediate availability of Zend Framework 3.
What is Zend Framework 3?
For Zend Framework 2 MVC users, the differences are subtle:
Migration from version 2 to version 3 was at the top of our minds, and we have provided a number of forwards compatibility features over the course of ZF3 development, and written migration guides to help you navigate the changes.
If you are already familiar with our MVC, or want to get started with it, we have created a new version of the skeleton application that ships with minimal dependencies, and provides a number of convenience features including the ability to select optional packages at installation, as well as auto-register components and modules when adding them to your application. Read more about the skeleton in the documentation.
For newcomers to the framework, we have been working on our package architecture, and attempting to make each package installable with a minimal amount of dependencies, to allow usage in any project, from Zend Framework MVC applications to other popular frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony. All components are now developed independently, with their own release schedules, allowing us to ship bugfixes and new features more frequently. This change has allowed us to tag multiple hundreds of releases in the past year!
The Zend Framework 3 initiatives also included a number of new features, primarily around PSR-7 (HTTP Message interfaces) support. These include:
Yes, you read that correctly: Zend Framework now ships with a microframework as a parallel offering to its MVC full-stack framework! For users new to Zend Framework who are looking for a place to dive in, we recommend Expressive, as we feel PSR-7 middleware represents the future of PHP application development.
The release today is a new beginning for the framework, returning to its original mission: a strong component library, with opt-in MVC features.
Join our community today; we're available on the #zftalk Freenode IRC channel, and via our component repositories (for discussing issues and development).
— The Zend Framework Team —
Look for follow-up posts on this blog soon, detailing some of the new features!
Subscribe to this blog via RSS.