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PHP frameworks: not there yet

Over the last week I’ve been designing a mini-PHP application. No big deal, just a back end admin system with a simple display on the front end with some blog like feedback mechanisms.

I’ve had a look at the great work the Ruby on Rails people have done with Ruby and wondered whether PHP has anything similar.

Learning Ruby is too big an investment for the simple application I want to write.

PHP does indeed have a number of Rails like frameworks. Unfortunately, none are as mature as Rails. Pitty. PHP 5 is a very capable object oriented language and needs a decent framework to make it competitive.

I’ve had a look at the Zend Framework, Cake PHP and Prado. All three are nearly there, but not quite.

The Zend Framework would be my first choice but it falls down on the implementation of the model. I couldn’t find much documentation about how to interface to MySQL.

Dennis Pallett has created a great comparison of PHP frameworks.

UPDATE: Add symfony to your evaluation list too. Thanks to Sara for pointing it out.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 @ 11:36 am on the category General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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6 Comments

  1. ses5909 says:

    I keep hearing really great things about symfony although I haven’t tried them myself.

    Quote | Posted February 17, 2008, 11:32 pm
  2. Jack (subscribed to comments) says:

    @sara - Hmmm. Not looked at symfony as yet. Though a quick look at the project website showed a good sign…a book. Never a bad sign that for an open source project.

    Quote | Posted February 18, 2008, 11:08 am
  3. Jack (subscribed to comments) says:

    In fact I’ve ordered the symfony book! If the tutorial is anything to go by I think I may have found PHP heaven!

    Quote | Posted February 19, 2008, 11:28 am
  4. ses5909 says:

    Well please update us on your findings if you try it out. It is something I would like to try out when I have time.

    Quote | Posted February 20, 2008, 2:03 am
  5. Jack Hughes (subscribed to comments) says:

    @sara - will do. The book arrived this morning…I shall be devouring it over the next few days. I have an application in mind related to this blog so I won’t be shy about mentioning it. :)

    Quote | Posted February 20, 2008, 11:38 am
  6. Jack Hughes (subscribed to comments) says:

    @sara - the first piece of feedback I have about symfony is that it does seem to be more understandable simply because I already know PHP. Rails was more of a problem because I not only had to learn the Rails framework itself but also struggle to learn Ruby at the same time.

    Quote | Posted February 20, 2008, 11:40 am

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