But one thing you must understand is that the Zend Framework has the Zend company as well as IBM behind it, which is a huge advantage in terms of support, future availability, and quality code.

Magento (one of the leading ecommerce platforms) also uses Zend Framework as part of the stack, Magento’s decision to use ZF as appose to other frameworks was a clear-cut one.

If you AREN’T planning to use Doctrine or similar project, I think you will regret it. Getting the required expertise to do well what Doctrine does is harder probably than building the entire rest of your framework.

I started using Zend and found it pretty easy to get going. The documentation and community that has been mentioned in these comments provided what I needed at the time. That said, I would definitely consider Solar for a future project, as I don’t need the Lucene, Twitter, etc. support that some use as examples of Zend being more complete. I would actually prefer to scale back to a more lightweight framework at this point.

What would help me is a migration guide — something that illustrates “in Zend you to , but in Solar you do .” This might sound petty, but I have been doing this long enough that I dread learning yet another way to do essentially the same thing. All my web apps interact with a database, populate template variables, collect form data, parse xml, make http requests, etc.

Some people relish the idea of learning a new language/framework/paradigm. Maybe I’m getting old, but I just want to get to the finished product these days.

I probably would contribute, but I can’t justify the time it would take to learn Solar due to its lack of documentation.

But still, kudos on what appears to be a very mature framework. And on route rewriting making it to the beta release.