PHP Frameworks

[George P Burdell]

Has anyone here used Zend's framework? I know PHP frameworks are a dime-a-dozen, but I'm specifically interested in Zend.

 

[blurredvision]

Not to highjack, but as someone who is studying PHP, what is a framework? Maybe somebody can answer my question along with yours 🙂.

 

[tfinch2]

Originally posted by: blurredvision
Not to highjack, but as someone who is studying PHP, what is a framework? Maybe somebody can answer my question along with yours 🙂.

It's like a support structure for your project. It defines a way to accomplish common tasks, such as code organization, abstraction layers, database transactions, etc.

 

[George P Burdell]

Originally posted by: blurredvision
Not to highjack, but as someone who is studying PHP, what is a framework? Maybe somebody can answer my question along with yours 🙂.

PHP frameworks gained popularity after Ruby on Rails took the web development community by fire. Many projects were launched to bring the benefits of RoR to the PHP community. Unfortunately, this has led to several PHP frameworks, each with its own pros and cons.

I've worked with Symfony earlier and I like the command-line interface (saves a lot of time), but now that Zend (the big cheese of the PHP world) has rolled out its own framework, I'm interested in seeing how good it is.

Here are elevator pitches from a few popular web frameworks:

CakePHP:

CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

Symfony:

Symfony is a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP5.

It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise.

Symfony is based on experience. It does not reinvent the wheel: it uses most of the best practices of web development and integrates some great third-party libraries.

CodeIgniter:

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you're a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you're tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks

 

[Bateluer]

Ooh, those will be helpful, thanks.

 

[NiKeFiDO]

CodeIgniter is one I learned - I found it to be the easiest and simplest to pick up and go with (and with very cleanly written libraries!)

Unfortunately it uses php 4 "OOP" - However, there is a php5 version out there (masquerading as a different framework).

Zend is a powerful framework, but harder to use (higher learning curve).

I should mention that if you are running php5, you can pretty easily combine php5 code into CodeIgniter

CI will also be the "engine" 4 ExpressionEngine 2 - a good CMS (although NOT open source 🙁 )