Which PHP framework

[monaghan]

In another thread it was suggested to use one of the PHP frameworks. I've looked at these in the past, but to migrate an existing project is not practical, however, I have a new project (quite small and simple so ideal to learn something new).

The logical one to choose seems to be Zend given the Zend & PHP linkage, however, there is lots of mention of other frameworks. Anyone suggest a justifiable reason not to use Zend and if so which other framework would you use and why?

The project is PHP, so please no Ruby or Python suggestions

 

[jonno]

i've been using ZF for a couple of years, it was a bit ropey bug wise to start off with but 1.9 seems to have improved. zend form specifically is a lifesaver, it seems to save me literally hours of time.

 

[davedevelopment]

I thought I'd give others a chance seeing as I might have been the author in the other thread, I'm a big fan of ZF, use it daily for my 9-5 job. If you have a small project to learn with, go for it.

The only reason I wouldn't use ZF (or specifically the MVC stack in ZF) is for very small projects, that I don't think will grow, in which case I'd use CodeIgniter (or Yii, which I've not used yet) as it's much smaller. For example, I wrote a small URL shortener in CodeIgniter, but I wrote ZFSnippets.com in Zend Framework.

The other great thing about Zend is that it is also a great component library, you can drop it into any existing application and start to use the components such as the validators, Zend_Db and all the services classes etc.

 

[retired_member21]

It depends what you are doing? I've always found ZF a little heavyweight and tend to prefer CodeIgniter (MVC)

 

[monaghan]

I already tend to write code to run through a central router and drop out to include files / classes, so the jump to a formal MVC will not be too much of a culture shock!

My concern in the past with frameworks (not just PHP) was the DB library, having spent years as a DBA, normalised schemas are "normal" for me, but mapping these easily into standard db libraries has always seemed a black art needing a lot of work to generate updates to data read from joined tables. Has this improved? Previously I've always found it easier to do the DB work manually rather than framework libraries.

 

[tifosi]

Zend is a monster for small projects.

YII is good, relatively lightweight and the code is very upto date php5 oop.

Kohana is a good alternative especially the newer v3: http://kohanaframework.org/

S

 

[tifosi]

I already tend to write code to run through a central router and drop out to include files / classes, so the jump to a formal MVC will not be too much of a culture shock!

My concern in the past with frameworks (not just PHP) was the DB library, having spent years as a DBA, normalised schemas are "normal" for me, but mapping these easily into standard db libraries has always seemed a black art needing a lot of work to generate updates to data read from joined tables. Has this improved? Previously I've always found it easier to do the DB work manually rather than framework libraries.

Most of the more modern frameworks have very good abstraction models, the better ones also utilising PDO which is one of the better but still unregognised features of php5.2+.

Some of the better frameworks use ORM for database -to-class mapping, though there's the opinion it's somewhat of an overhead.

Essentially IMO a well structured normalised table structure should be framework independent and the database abstraction layer should just do it's job.

S