It's funny you keep referring to Java as the example for over-engineered code. That's true if you look at the built-in stuff, but if you look at frameworks like Play, it's not so bad.
That said, I completely agree with you on ZF2 being a complete mess. If you've ever used Magento, which is built on the Zend Framework and who partners pretty close with Zend, you'll see some of these ridiculous development practices in reality. At some point, the cognitive load of keeping track of all the various files and object structures has really got to outweigh any benefit of flexibility you might have. And what's really scary is there is some good, useful code locked away inside of these nightmarish libraries.
I would suggest looking at Symfony. They are taking a modular approach that lets you pick and choose the bits from the framework that you want, rather than having to take everything. You might find it kind of refreshing.
Just to be clear; I realise my comments alluding to Java were extremely lazy short-hand - I did specifically call out Play right at the end as an example of a Java framework for which over-engineering wasn't really the case.
Thankfully I haven't had much exposure to Magento, but your comments chime with things other people have said - one cynical wag I know declaring that it seemed to be specifically designed with the consultancy business in mind. I have had exposure to SugarCRM, and I could say the same things you just did about cognitive load and development practices effectively being a barrier to entry to some actually quite nice code.
>It's funny you keep referring to Java as the example for over-engineered code. That's true if you look at the built-in stuff, but if you look at frameworks like Play, it's not so bad.
Yes, but the above roughly translates to: "if you look at Java OUTLIER frameworks, it's not so bad".
That said, I completely agree with you on ZF2 being a complete mess. If you've ever used Magento, which is built on the Zend Framework and who partners pretty close with Zend, you'll see some of these ridiculous development practices in reality. At some point, the cognitive load of keeping track of all the various files and object structures has really got to outweigh any benefit of flexibility you might have. And what's really scary is there is some good, useful code locked away inside of these nightmarish libraries.
I would suggest looking at Symfony. They are taking a modular approach that lets you pick and choose the bits from the framework that you want, rather than having to take everything. You might find it kind of refreshing.