ZF Is Retired. Laminas MVC Is Retiring. Consider It Solved

It all started with the announcement: Laminas MVC Is Retiring. Some people wrongfully thought everything with a Laminas logo is going away – NOT SO! Read on for a bit of history about Zend and Laminas, what it means to migrate your platform and why it’s a decision that should not be taken lightly.

A Bit of History

Laminas MVC is not even the first framework that has reached its end of life – look at Zend Framework and Apigility. Letting go of a flagship product is a difficult decision, but it’s made easier when you leave a solid alternative in its wake. The developers who worked on Laminas MVC already had something better and fully-functional in place – Mezzio microframework, built using Laminas components. It has itself gone through rigorous development and testing since being released in 2015 when it was known as Zend Expressive, then was renamed into Mezzio to get to its current state.

What Is the Issue with Legacy Platforms?

Maintaining legacy platforms over the long term is often a costly and time-consuming endeavour. Every few years, platform owners must consider the viablity of migrating to a newer platform.

Newer platforms implement modern architectures, have an active community and are actively being developed and maintained. They also offer easier development, expansion and maintenance, alongside vital security improvements and more reliable dependencies.

Sounds like an easy decision? Sure, but it’s a lot of work… And that’s when the specialists come into play.

We at Apidemia have been using the Zend Framework, Laminas MVC and Mezzio for years. We understand their ins-and-outs intimately, which enables us to analyze and to perform the transfer of a legacy platform to Mezzio effectively. Working with Mezzio ensures faster execution times, increased security, faster development and long-term reliability from all points of view. We encourage this change and are ready to offer guidance.

Pain Points

The MVC architecture is obsolete. It is yesterday’s architecture, fit for monolithic websites. The architecture of today and tomorrow is based on middleware, building headless platforms, websites and microservices following the same coding approach.

Pain Point	Apidemia Solution
Legacy framework is deprecated and/or has no long-term support	Apidemia helps migrate to modern middleware architecture (Mezzio microframework with Laminas components)
Legacy applications are hard to maintain	Modern architecture improves code quality, testability and performance
Migration is risky or expensive	Apidemia uses a proven, phased migration strategy to reduce risk
Lack of internal development expertise	Apidemia provides end-to-end guidance, refactoring, training and support

How Apidemia handles migrations

Apidemia have created a complex process that involves several steps to ensure a smooth migration. In a nutshell, the current project functionality must be understood and only then can the move be implemented into the destination platform. Over the long run, the Apidemia team offers support and training.

This is the simplified task list:

• Code audit & migration strategy – to understand the code and see what goes where.
• Partial or full migration to Laminas or PSR-compliant frameworks, like Mezzio or Symfony – this decision impacts both time to implement and cost, negotiated with the client.
• Refactoring and decoupling legacy modules – the old code must go and be replaced with the new.
• Unit testing and CI/CD pipeline setup – a vital step to ensure things function the same way in the destination platform.
• Post-migration support and team training – this step depends on the level of collaboration between the original developers and the Apidemia team, so the more closely they work together, the easier it is to onboard the devs for the long run.

Additional resources

• Dotkernel Headless Platform
• Shared Core Submodule in Dotkernel Headless Platform
• Understanding Middleware
• Dotkernel Light
• Migrate Laminas MVC to Dotkernel

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