Ah, PHP. Originally designed for producing dynamic web pages, it has evolved so much since its birth over a decade ago. Although you may understand the basics of PHP, you could be missing a vital component of PHP development: frameworks. Frameworks can help development teams concentrate on specific requirements without expending valuable time and energy designing and implementing low-level, common functions required by an application. With frameworks, a team can develop projects much f...
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Before talking about which frameworks were selected, it's worth talking about what a framework is. The idea behind a framework is to offer a design you can use across multiple applications. All applications have a number of basic things in common — specifically, some kind of interface with a database, some amount of application logic, something that presents the application to the user. If you've written many PHP applications, you know what this looks like. Y...
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There are several frameworks available for nearly every language. Selecting the right one for your needs can be somewhat difficult, especially if you haven't used any of them before. While advice and opinions from colleagues and trusty developerWorks authors can be helpful in this area, there is really only one guiding principle that should be followed when selecting any framework: A framework is only as good as the amount of time and effort it saves everyone. A f...
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Each of the frameworks has its own set of installation instructions, and a thorough discussion of installation particulars is outside the scope of this article. Each installation will be highlighted, calling out the high points that may not be covered in each individual framework's installation instructions, or where deviation from these instructions is necessary due to the particulars of installing all three on a single machine.Begin by creating a folder to hold all the code, fra...
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You've downloaded and installed three frameworks. But you'll have noticed that you didn't really do anything with them yet, like verify the installations with a Hello World application. That's because you're going to jump right past Hello World and into something a little (but not much more) meaty.Building a Hello World application in a PHP framework can be a little painful. Using a framework involves some overhead, and that overhead gets in the way when you're trying to do someth...
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Before you can really build Blahg, you need to get the databases set up. It's not at all necessary to set up a database for each individual framework, but for the purpose of this series, it will help keep things a little more organized while avoiding the necessity for table prefixes.Create three databases, called Zend, symfony, and Cake, and grant full rights to each database to an appropriate user. The instructions for each framework below will contain the SQL necessary to create...
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I thought I would share with you my experience of PHP frameworks, and in particular a framework called CodeIgniter which I have been using a lot recently. A PHP framework is a platform which enables developers to quickly build web applications without having to re-invent the wheel every time they want to, for example, insert data securely in to a database. This article looks at CodeIgniter (http://codeigniter.com), an open-source PHP framework which in my opinion is fantastic.The need f...
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Some recent attention in the PHP framework community has been focused on the recent publication of Symfony 2 Preview benchmarks showing that Symfony 2 outperforms Zend Framework by a factor of 3.5. It also outperforms every other benchmarked framework. This reminded me of the earlier Yii Framework benchmarks which allegedly proved that Yii outperforms Zend Framework by a factor of 7. At this point, the spirit of Glenn Beck would have me demonstrate that 3.5 multiplied by 2 (the number of eyes...
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First of all, we believe you should know what a PHP framework is before we move forward to a full tutorial of PHP frameworks. PHP is the most common scripting language in the world and there are many reasons for this. It is flexible and easy to use. There are times when coding in PHP or any other language can get a bit repetitive and droning. This is where a PHP framework comes in and this starts out a tutorial of PHP frameworks. ...
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The Simple PHP Framework is a pragmatic approach to building websites with PHP 5. It’s geared towards web design shops and freelance programmers looking for a common foundation to quickly bring web projects to life. Without getting too technical, SPF follows the no-framework Framework method coined by Rasmus Lerdorf — with a little Active Record  thrown in for good measure.Project HistoryThis framework is the foundation that all of my websites are built with...
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