Using a PHP framework can speed project development and make it easier to create stable, reliable, and modern web applications.
Scripting language frameworks generally extend the basic principles behind a language like PHP, by making it simpler to develop web applications. PHP, which originally stood for personal home page, was created in 1995 when a software engineer, Rasmus Lerdorf, wanted a better way to programmatically track page views for the resume on his personal website. Eventually, Lerdorf made his Personal Home Page Tools (PHP/FI) available open source, and the PHP community was born.
Later Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski would essentially rewrite the open source scripting language while developing an ecommerce application as a college project. The resulting, more extensible PHP was released as PHP 3 in June 1998. Just a semester later, Gutmans and Suraski developed a new core for PHP, specifically designed to improve the language's modularity and to boost its performance when used in complex applications. The result was the “Zend Engine,” which was a blend of Gutmans' and Suraski’s first names, Zeev and Andi. PHP 4, featuring the Zend Engine, was released in 2000. It became one of the most successful web development languages to date. Four years later, PHP 5 was released. It uses the Zend Engine 2.0 and has several new object models and features.
Today, PHP is the scripting language behind an estimated 20 million websites, including Facebook, Yahoo!, and every Magento store, so it is little wonder that web developers use the language extensively.
With so much PHP development, there have been several established extensions and frameworks, which, as mentioned above, can speed up your work. Below, I have provided links to and basic information about nine of the best known and most used PHP frameworks.
Zend Framework
The Zend Framework aims for extreme simplicity and productivity. It is the framework at the heart of Magento. It also easily integrates APIs from Google, Amazon Web Services, Yahoo! Developer Network, Flickr, StrikeIron, ProgrammableWeb, and dozens of others.
CodeIgniter
CodeIgnitor is a lightweight PHP framework that is popular in the WordPress community. It is also reported to work well in shared hosting environments.
CakePHP
CakePHP is a PHP framework built on a Model, View, Controller (MVC) architecture, with an application scaffolding and code generation capability similar to what you would find in Rudy on Rails. The framework can be developed rapidly, but also supports very complex applications and loads of site traffic.
Symfony
The Symfony Framework is aimed at easing development for complex enterprise-level web applications. Symfony has code generation features. The framework also has an active community supporting it and developing for it.
Seagull
Seagull is an established PHP framework created to help developers build complex applications quickly and mange and integrate code changes after the application has been developed. The framework has a modular construction, can be installed in a minute or less, and is very stable.
Kohana
A strict PHP 5 object-oriented programming framework, Kohana is built on an MVC architecture and, like many frameworks, aims to produce efficient code that is stable and easy to use. This framework has an active community of users and features cascading resources for better extensibility.
Sapphire
The Sapphire framework was originally created to support the SilverStripe open source content management system (CMS), but has since been released as a PHP framework for all developers. Because of its CMS heritage, the framework is particularly good for creating forms, like an article submission form for a blog or a product submission form for the backend of an ecommerce site.
Yii Web Programming Framework
The Yii PHP framework is designed for large applications. It easily supports jQuery, includes advanced authentication and role-based access control components, uses a MVC architecture, and includes an application scaffolding, to name just a few of its features.
Solar Framework for PHP 5
The Solar project is the work of Paul M. Jones, who is very active in the community, and is based on the Savant template system.
Related Articles
This article is filed under PHP and has the following keyword tags: PHP, framework, list, scripting, Lerdorf, Zend.
2 Comments
blacksmith_tb says:
"Rudy on rails"? Was that an episode of Fat Albert I missed in my youth?
Armando Roggio says:
@blacksmith_tb. I think it was on Fat Albert. I guess for this post I should have written;
"CakePHP is a PHP framework built on a Model, View, Controller (MVC) architecture, with an application scaffolding and code generation capability so good that the creators of Rudy on Rails completely stole it."
What do you think?
