CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpzend-frameworkzend-framework2
Shaolin
Shaolin

Reputation: 2551

Migrate to Zend Framework 2 from Zend Framework 1

We have pretty big application which has about 8 modules (big modules) written using Zend framework 1 and it has been developed for more than 3 years by couple of developers. Also it has a high traffic everyday. We use Amozon s3, Sphinx, Memcache, and some other third party services as well.

Is it a good idea to migrate it to Zend framework 2 ? Because as we went through the doc briefly, it seems Zend framework 2 has been re-written completely. Therefore we think we won't be able to migrate the application easily rather than re-writing the application according to ZF 2.

Valuable ideas would be highly appreciated.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1913

Answers (2)

timdev
timdev

Reputation: 62894

You are correct that ZF2 is a completely different animal. So different, in fact, that there's no one-size-fits-all migration plan/strategy.

However, I recently did a similar migration. It's a fairly complex line-of-business application originally written over approximately 18 months, with a bunch of varied functionality. The main drivers for the decision were the improvements in the module and event systems.

In our case, it turned into a major point release for the product, which ended up including a bunch of UI changes along with all the plumbing.

Assuming you liked ZF1, the good news is that ZF2 is much better framework (as a framework). The ModuleManager, EventManager, Di, and ServiceManager components (and the general MVC-related stuff) are really great, once you grok them. The bad news is that they're a complete departure from ZF1. So you're at the very least signing up to completely overhaul your dispatch and routing, you'll be saying goodbye to Zend_Registry (ServiceManager/ServiceLocator are a huge improvement).

The other bit of good news is that you can almost certainly keep all the old ZF1-type components around for as long as you need them. So if you're relying on Zend_Cache, Zend_Log, Zend_Mail, etc, a little bit of fiddling with autoloader configs should make that possible.

What I'm suggesting is that if you do take the plunge, consider just migrating to ZF2-as-a-framework first, and worry about ZF2-as-a-component-library later.

If you've stuck with the fat-model/skinny-controller paradigm, it's probably feasible to just replace the Controllers, Front-Controller, Zend_Application stuff in a fairly straight-forward way. Once you get that into production, you can then work on removing dependencies on ZF1 components as time permits. In my case, there wasn't much of that, as things were pretty well factored and wrapped (so, for example, moving from Zend_Cache to Zend\Cache was trivial)

Finally, you should know up-front that View-layer stuff (mostly the helper-related stuff) is different too. If you have a bunch of complicated view-related stuff (partials, custom view-helpers, etc) all over the place, you need to anticipate either rewriting them, or finding a way to use the old Zend_View stuff in ZF2 so you can migrate piecemeal. I didn't really deal with this because our interfaces were fairly simple and we took it as an opportunity to overhaul the UI.

Just my $0.02, but I hope it helps.

Upvotes: 6

matt
matt

Reputation: 367

There is no quick and easy way to migrate because ZF2 is very different from ZF1.

Related: Step by step migration from Zend Framework 1 to 2

Upvotes: 2

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