Zend Framework can save your weekends?

And maybe even your marriage. I wrote this on Apr 2nd so that its not mistaken for an April fools joke, but a customer of ours wrote a very interesting article about the benefits he sees from using Zend Framework. He listed many great benefits of ZF standardization at Panasonic, but one of the more interesting ones was a business value that I have not seen blogged about much.

Jim Plush wrote: Upsides to this for (my) developers is the fact you're getting trained on the most popular php framework out there and no longer will you have to spend your weekends learning someone (else's) code who just quite.

This indeed is a major problem faced by many managers who have to support not just PHP, but other legacy environments both old PHP ones and other apps like the one Jim writes about in his blog when the team changes over time. As managers we know that successful apps will live on for many many years so a good strategy of how to reduce support costs over time was an important factor for Jim, so his solution was to simplify and standardize on best practices with the zend framework moving forward. As he put it so well in his own words.

We're dedicating all in house development to Zend Framework. If it's a web app it's either built in our Zend Framework infrastructure or it doesn't get built (in Panasonic.)

This final statement was something I have been hearing a lot from development managers who are optimizing the productivity of their web development efforts using PHP. I hope to share this same scenario from one of the largest Fortune 500 firms in an upcoming article. Today I learned that they also are writing about their own results using Zend so I wont spoil the presentation. Stay tuned. But if you want to learn more about why Jim at Panasonic chose Zend Framework and PHP for his Enterprise, read on.

It looks like he's also looking for a few more good people to add to his Zend Framework team, read job post here - the March job numbers are expected to be horrible, but folks with Zend skills are doing very well indeed this year.