No more Zend Framework, yay!

The next iteration of JomSocial will finally do away with Zend Framework. A while ago, we decided to "supplement" our underlying development framework with an extensive, well supported php framework to speed up development process. Joomla! at that time, have not yet launch their Joomla-Platform initiative.

Although Zend framework does gives us a bit more features as opposed to core Joomla framework, it does have quite a few downside. Firstly, it is a huge library and took a while do be installed. Our installer had to download them separately with each install, which does fail at times. Secondly, coding style of ZF is also different than Joomla!, causing mixed coding style within our internal code. Finally, although we manage to minimize it, it does have some impact to JomSocial app in term of performance.

Another development that force me to rethink ZF approach is the maturity of Joomla-Platform itself. Ever since Joomla decided to split the cms and platform part of Joomla saperately, we noticed a marked improvement in the platform code. I personally cannot wait for Joomla 3.x series to go LTS so we can tap on its delicious code. You may follow Joomla! development team on Joomla!-Platform at https://github.com/joomla/joomla-platform

What does this mean in simple terms? Much faster install process, smaller package, better performance and overall much easier code to work with.