The Laminas Project

A community-supported, open source continuation of Zend Framework.

Since its inception, Zend Technologies, and later Rogue Wave Software, single-handedly led and sponsored the Zend Framework project. Over the years, Zend Framework has seen wide adoption across the PHP ecosystem, with an emphasis on the Enterprise market. It has formed the basis of numerous business applications and services including eCommerce platforms, content management, healthcare systems, entertainment platforms and portals, messaging services, APIs, and many others.

To take it to the next step of adoption and innovation, Zend Framework and all its subprojects have been transitioned to the Linux Foundation as the Laminas Project.

The Linux Foundation is host to a range of widely successful open source projects, and has led many similar transitions in the past. We believe transitioning to this proven governance model will help us both grow in adoption and contributors, and allow us to focus on delivering best of breed innovative code, using the highest standards of security, transparency, and quality.

Laminas is currently governed by a Technical Charter under the Linux Foundation. We are also working towards a funded project model, which will entail an additional Governing Board to manage marketing the project, funding development, developing partnerships, and more.

If you are interested in helping us achieve our goal to become a project model, please contact us to learn more about membership benefits and how your company can help expand the project ecosystem.

Become a Founding Member of the Governing Board

As noted, we are hoping to adopt a funded project model to help grow the ecosystem through marketing efforts, monetarily sponsoring targeted development projects, and providing maintainer stipends. These efforts would be funded through membership dues and contributed engineering resources. Contact us if you are interested in becoming a founding member of the Governing Board.

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FAQ

About Laminas and its governance

In spinning the project into its own foundation, we needed to differentiate the Open Source project from the commercial Zend brand, which has meant new names!

Laminas is the plural of lamina, meaning a thin layer. We feel it succinctly summarizes the goals of the project in many ways:

  • Components you can compose or layer into any application.
  • Middleware architectures are often termed layered.

The project will encompass each of the following:

  • The various standalone components.
  • The MVC framework.
  • The Apigility subproject, which becomes Laminas API Tools.
  • The Expressive subproject, which becomes Mezzio.

Governance

The project is currently led by its Technical Steering Committee (TSC). The TSC makes all project-related decisions at this time, ranging from technical to marketing and funding.

The Technical Steering Committee's primary role is to make decisions about what we maintain, what milestones to work on, who has commit access to specific repositories, and the general technical direction of the project.

When we are able to move forward as a funded project through the Linux Foundation, the project will have two governance bodies: the TSC, and a Governing Board. The TSC will continue to be responsible for technical decisions, but the Governing Board will take over business and marketing decisions for the project.

The Governing Board will consist of representatives from member companies, as well as one or more TSC members. The Board will be responsible for establishing the governance structure and general project oversight including business decisions, budgets, organizing events and working groups, providing marketing support to the project, and handling IP or legal issues as they arise.

The project will also eventually include a small team of developers to help lead the day-to-day maintenance, manage automation, keep the web presence online, and other tasks necessary to keeping the project going. This team will help provide project continuity, allowing contributors to focus on the contributions they care about most.

What has happened to Zend Framework?

All Zend Framework components, including the MVC runtime, has moved to a new Laminas organization under GitHub. Apigility packages have moved from the zfcampus organization to the Laminas API Tools organization. Expressive packages have moved to the Mezzio organization.

The existing repositories have all been archived. This means it will remain available on GitHub, but will be read-only; this allows existing installations to continue working without interruption, while clearly signal that development has moved to the new projects. The related package entries on Packagist have been marked as deprecated, and point to the relevant new packages as alternatives.

All new packages published by the Laminas Project have been marked as replacements of the existing Zend Framework packages, and includes tools for aliasing legacy classes to the new package classes. This allows for seamless integration in existing projects, including when using third-party libraries that leveraged ZF code.

Finally, we have provided tools both to update your own code to use the new classes provided by Laminas packages, as well as to help you update your dependencies to use the new Laminas packages instead of the Zend Framework versions. These are provided as a combination of a Composer plugin, configuration post-processors for MVC and Mezzio applications, and the laminas-migration tool.