With all of the negative opinions flying around about the Zend Framework, Stefan Esser takes a look at the other side, the positive side of the Framework in this new post on the PHP Security Blog.

Until today there have been a lot of blog postings about the Zend Framework. People love or hate it for their own special reasons. I personally think that everyone who works on it should really consider what he does by signing the CLA and working on it. The message he gives is, that Zend is right in communicating the Zend Framework as a must, because all other frameworks are by definition bad and untrustworthy, because they are only developed by a bunch of open source geeks and there is no company in control.

On the other hand one must see what a framework, which is used everywhere means for security researchers like me. When a common framework is used, this is a single point of failure for tons of web applications. A security hole in the framework will expose a large number of servers at the same time.

It could be a scary world to have a "single point" that potential intruders could focus on, but then again, there's also all of those applications like phpBB that are *very* widely used that that same thing could be said for...