What’s in a name?
And to continue the well known quote, ‘. . .That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ To very roughly paraphrase Shakespeare here: substance trumps the superficial.
So this is my roundabout way of announcing that we’ve decided to name the next release of Zend Framework ‘1.5′. First off, I don’t want people to get too hung up on the name. We were faced with the dilemma of having a release that included far too many essential changes to be deemed a regular minor release, while we wanted to reserve the major release revisions for larger breaks in backwards-compatibility. ‘1.5′ seemed to be a reasonable compromise. With major stories in command line tooling, forms, and authentication among other major improvements in PDF and Lucene search, the scope of 1.5 was significantly larger than what we hope our standard minor release would amount to considering that we would prefer to make new features available to all of our users as often as possible. Ultimately, we chose this version name because what is going in to the 1.5 release is substantial, and- if we can trust our good friend Shakespeare- this is much more important than whatever it happens to be called.
I hope you’re looking forward to Zend Framework 1.5 as much as I am!
Posted by Wil December 8, 2007 at 9:8 am
13 comments to “What’s in a name?”
To be honest, I personally don’t like those ‘.5′ naming schemes. For one, they imply a sort of ‘halfway there’ feeling. Also, in migration efforts (something framework users have to do a lot), it makes it more difficult to estimate the number of versions you are skipping when upgrading.
If something is minor, you go from 1.1.0 to 1.1.1. If it’s major, you go from 1.1 to 1.2. If it’s VERY major, as in a whole new generation, you go from 1 to 2.
I think adding a third level of ‘minor/major’ indicator, in the form of undefined skips of a version to .5 only ads confusion.
(What if the version after 1.5 also has things too major for 1.6, will it be 1.10?)
Understood. This is a decision that we put some thought in to. If we were to increment the minor release number by just 1, we would have set expectations pretty high for the 1.2 release.
Ultimately, everybody has their own naming conventions, and- as I’m sure we’re all aware- we can’t rely on them to determine release scope across all projects. That’s why I encourage you to take a look at the feature list when the first release candidate is made available. With major functionality added in the areas of CLI tooling, forms, view enhancements, authentication, search, and PDF processing, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed!
[…] not all of the above will make it into Zend Framework 1.1 (update: now version 1.5 to make it clear how much more substantial this release will be over a standard .x […]
If there is nothing in a name than why didn’t you just leave it at 1.1? I don’t get it, but hey, if you want to trick newcomers into thinking the project has been around longer and is more stable than go ahead. I’m looking forward to it either way. Keep up the good work.
When release of 1.5 versions is planned?
Whether it is planned to add support of library of navigation?
Zend_Navigation?
so, when will 1.5 be available ?
For some reason I missed this when you posted it!
I think 1.5 makes sense, but it shows that feature creep has occurred and we should have done a 1.1, 1.2 earlier to pull in the new stuff in smaller chunks.
Regards,
Rob…
[…] has posted that the next version of Zend Framework will be version 1.5, not 1.1 as was previously […]
I generally agree with you wholeheartedly. For the forseeable future we plan to keep our minor release cycles nice and short. The 1.5 release is a little different, however, in that we’re releasing many features that people would expect in a 1.0 release from any ‘next gen’ framework Stuff like forms support, easy-to-use AJAX integration, and CLI tooling. But we at Zend don’t look at these as small upgrades to maintain functional parity with other frameworks. We’re releasing functionality that hasn’t been seen in any framework- PHP or otherwise- until now. It is a continuation of Zend Framework’s ongoing strategy in a growing field of web application frameworks. We will always build *up* to the simple use cases so that we never sacrifice flexibility and extensibility in a race for the most common (many would say dumbed-down) requirements, and, while we believe in opinionated software, we believe a software *framework* should respect the developer’s opinions. This strategy will result in slightly longer development cycles, and in this case it resulted in our first minor release becoming slightly larger than what we expect in minor releases to come as the minimal functionality that we will accept for these features is broader in scope than what you may have seen in other frameworks. Ultimately, Zend Framework is in this game for the long-haul, and we believe that this is the best strategy for our users not just now but years from now. Fortunately, we’ve got the contribution and support of many people like Rob. . ., so I think we’ll all be building ‘better software, faster’ for a long time to come.
On the version numbering note, I personally have always used 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, etc - never had a 3rd number (and don’t get me started on those 0.1, 0.2, etc :D)
On the framework note, I’m really looking forward to the 1.5 release - the forms component is one that I will be using a lot and I’m interested to see how the command line tools will turn out.
Keep up the good work all
1.5 release estimate?
I realize you can’t provide an exact date, but wondered if you had some idea on when this might be expected? For example, 1st quarter 2008 or something like that?
[…] alle prime indiscrezioni iniziali riguardo ad una possibile versione di Zend Framework 1.1, Wil ha confermato che la prossima versione sarà identificata come […]
Good guess! The 1.5 release time frame is indeed Q1 2008.
In fact, we simply don’t see a lot of significance in these version numbers beyond what position the incremented number is in- as defined in our release versions guidelines as document on the framework site. Some other people might see more- that’s fine. I’m just happy that you’re going to be trying it out- whatever it’s called.
As for ‘if you want to trick newcomers into thinking the project has been around longer and is more stable than go ahead,’ I can assure you that we have no intentions to trick anyone- this is hardly an Oracle 2.0 move.