Zend, as we all know is a popular e-commerce development framework preferred by online retailers and businesses all over the globe. After several years of consistent presence as one of the leading e-commerce frameworks, in October 2018, the arena company Rogue Wave Software came with a reorganization plan of the entire Zend Framework. Instantly the concerns were felt by the Zend Framework community and there was uncertainty about the framework’s future.
After just six months, in April last year, the parent company finally announced that they are going to transfer the entire Zend project to the Linux Foundation and the new project will be named Laminas. For months before this announcement the company actually worked on creating a tool to help transfer the entire project repositories to their new destination. The newly created tool will provide complete compatibility with all the standard and legacy Zend components.
As a leading Zend framework development company in India, we feel that this update brought a tectonic shift to the development approaches. Here through the rest of this blog post, we are going to explain the changes brought by this move, the way Laminas add value to the Zend framework, and how the migration takes place.
What are the Key Changes Brought by This Transfer?
The Laminas project brought several changes. Some autoloading components are now distributed freshly as Laminas components. Apart from these general changes, there are also several in-depth ones.
Now the original Zend repository has been turned to “Archived” on the GitHub platform and this obviously makes it only readable and so new issues and requests cannot be entertained. All the corresponding packages of the previous Zend repository have also been marked as “Abandoned” on the Packagist platform and there is a recommendation for the developers to use the similar and befitting Laminas package in its place.
In this respect, it is worth mentioning that the Zend users will still be able to access all prevailing Zend Frameworks, Apigility, as well as the packages, but with the only difference that they will not receive any updates. This is enough reason for the erstwhile Zend users to migrate to Laminas.
Related: Zend Framework MVC Architecture
Installation and Migration Process
For developers, Laminas Project comes with a very comprehensive migration guide that can be handy and useful for migrating applications as well as libraries using any of the existing Zend Frameworks, Apigility, or any of the Expressive packages. In case you want expert guidance, you can always opt for a Laminas migration services provider company to take on the task.
As for installing the new tool for migration the developers clearly have two choices, respectively through global composer requirement and through cloning. At the same time, it is recommended not to install it locally just because it removes the vendor/ subdirectory and so for dynamically loaded classes local installation can cause coding errors when classes are removed along with the vendor directory.
As soon as you finished the installation of the laminas-migration tool, just start a project for migration and run the following command:
$ laminas-migration migrate
Now, you may wish to evaluate that the changes created by this process are satisfactory. In case you use git, you can run the command below to see the changes:
$ git diff
Some of the key things that you should look for include reamed files and classes and changes in configuration keys.
After the migration is completed and you are done with the verification, it is time to install dependencies with the following command:
$ composer install
At last, run the unit tests and end-to-end tests to see whether the application works correctly. In case of any problem look for the specific components in the repository.
Understanding the Key Benefits of Laminas
In more than one way, Laminas project actually helped to shape the user experience of Zend framework users. Many of the shortcomings of Zend are likely to be addressed with this move.
There have been few things but remained the same and some changes made accessibility easier. For example, Apigility was always a third-party project that remained the same with Laminas. On the other hand, Expressive treated as general components as well as MVC under Zend packages is provided with its own organization just in the same fashion of Apigility.
On top of that, these organizations of packages and tools have been given new names as sub-projects under the new Laminas, such as Laminas API Tools and Mezzio. In GitHub these organizations of Laminas project are represented as the following:
- Laminas, representing all the components and the MVC.
- Laminas-API-tools represent the components of the Laminas API Tools which was formerly known as Apigility.
- Mezzio represents the components and runtime of Mezzio middleware that was formerly known as Expressive.
For the developers, this reorganization made it easier to find the required code for each project in hand.
How CMARIX can Help to Migrate from Zend to Laminas?
CMARIX as one of the most reputed players in the field of Zend e-commerce development has created a wide number of acclaimed e-commerce solutions by using the strengths and capabilities of the framework.
Our expertise with the Zend e-commerce development framework kept us hopeful for the evolution of the framework in a positive direction and so, when the Laminas project was unearthed we quickly stood up on our feet to utilize the latest changes and reorganization of packages to sharpen our skills in Zend development.
Thanks to the Laminas Project the erstwhile Zend loyalists will get a clear boost in their morale and technical abilities to deliver a more customer-centric online retail experience.
This is why we at CMARIX welcome the latest changes brought by the Laminas project wholeheartedly and our Zend experts are enthusiastic to utilize the new value additions for their eCommerce projects. If you consider using the fresh new potential of this newly launched update, hire Laminas developers from CMARIX to avail proven expertise.
Conclusion
Every framework stands the test of time if it decides to evaluate the demands of change. This is exactly why the Laminas Project as the latest avatar of the Zend framework should be welcomed by the e-commerce developers who made this framework popular. As Laminas project focused to deliver more on ease of building robust functionalities by reorganizing components and removing several less useful or useless ones, this will give fresh energy to the developers who always preferred Zend in their e-commerce projects.