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Should You Choose zend-expressive Over zend-mvc?

We recommend that you choose Expressive for any new project — if the choice is yours to make.

Why Use zend-mvc?

zend-mvc is a proven platform, with half a decade of development behind it. It is stable and battle-tested in production platforms.

Because it is opinionated about project structure and architecture, fewer decisions need be made up front; developers know where new code goes, and how it will wire into the overall application.

Additionally, a number of training courses exist, including offerings by Zend, allowing you or your team to fully learn the framework and take advantage of all its features.

Finally, zend-mvc has a lively module ecosystem, allowing you to add features and capabilities to your application without needing to develop them from scratch.

We Recommend Expressive

zend-mvc has many preconceptions about how things work, yet they're very broad and general. What’s more, it also has several pre-wired structures in place that may either aid you — or get in your way.

As a result, you are required to know a lot of what those things are — if you want to use it optimally. And to acquire that depth of knowledge, you’re going to need to spend a lot of time digging deep into zend-mvc’s internals before you begin to get the most out of it.

To quote Zend Framework project lead, Matthew Weier O’Phinney:

The problem is that zend-mvc is anything but beginner-friendly at this point. You're required to deep dive into the event manager, service manager, and module system — right from the outset; And to do this you need more than a passing understanding of object-oriented programming and a range of design patterns.

Expressive (specifically applications based on the Expressive Skeleton Installer) on the other hand, comes with barely any of these assumptions and requirements.

It provides a very minimalist structure. Essentially all you have to become familiar with are five core components. These are:

• A DI container.
• A router.
• An error handler for development.
• A template engine (if you’re not creating an API).
• PSR-7 messages and http-interop (future PSR-15) middleware.

In many cases, these are provided for you by the skeleton, and do not require any additional knowledge on your part. Given that, you can quickly get up to speed with the framework and begin creating the application that you need. We believe that this approach — in contrast to the zend-mvc approach — is more flexible and accommodating.

What’s more, you can mix and match the types of applications that you create.

• Do you just need an API? Great; you can do that quite quickly.
• Do you want an HTML-based front-end? That’s available too.

When building applications with Expressive, you can make use of the various Zend components, or any third-party components or middleware. You can pick and choose what you need, as and when you need it. You’re not bound by many, if any, constraints and design decisions.

In Conclusion

For what it’s worth, we’re not saying that zend-mvc is a poor choice! What we are saying is:

1. The learning curve, from getting started to building the first application, is significantly lower with Expressive
2. The ways in which you can create applications, whether through multiple pieces of middleware or by combining multiple Expressive apps, into one larger one, is a much more efficient and fluid way to work

Ultimately, the choice is always up to you, your team, and your project’s needs. We just want to ensure that you’ve got all the information you need, to make an informed decision.