PHP Frameworks defer and doesn’t stop evaluating. They compete between each other trying to seduce more developers. The purpose of PHP frameworks is to facilitate coding for developers by providing architecture, components and tools to build complex web apps faster. They do not stop evaluating; they are trying to complete themselves by being more flexible and intelligent, integrating the next generation of libraries and using the best practices of web development. Today, they are too many choices that developers are confused when, why to use that PHP framework rather than another. On this post, we will present you the best and famous PHP frameworks. Then, we will explain when and why we need, as developers, to use that frame rather than the other.

1 – ZF Zend Framework

Extending the art & spirit of PHP, Zend Framework is based on simplicity, object-oriented best practices, corporate friendly licensing, and a rigorously tested agile codebase. Zend Framework is focused on building more secure, reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications & web services, and consuming widely available APIs from leading vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr, as well as API providers and cataloguers like StrikeIron and ProgrammableWeb.

2 – 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.

3 – Symfony

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

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.

4 – 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.

5 – Orbit

Orbit is an MVC web framework for Lua. The design is inspired by lightweight Ruby frameworks such as Camping. It completely abandons the CGILua model of “scripts” in favor of applications, where each Orbit application can fit in a single file, but you can split it into multiple files if you want. All Orbit applications follow the WSAPI protocol, so they currently work with Xavante, CGI and Fastcgi. It includes a launcher that makes it easy to launch a Xavante instance for development.

6 – Limonade

Limonade is a PHP micro framework for rapid web development and prototyping.

7 – FAT-FREE

FAT-FREE is a powerful yet lightweight PHP 5.3+ Web development framework designed to help you build dynamic and robust applications – fast!
Condensed in a single 55KB file, the framework’s simple domain-specific language gives you access to Fat-Free’s all-purpose template engine, flexible cache, automatic spam protection, integrated unit testing tools, and code profiler. It’s so small and fast – it even has a bandwidth throttle for controlling Web server traffic. It’s also the only framework that shields you from bandwidth theft and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks.

8 – Vitche Emission

Vitche Emission PHP Framework is a non-commercial OpenSource project created to speed-up any PHP development.
It is best for creating SaaS applications and it incorporates many features currently hard to implement using plain PHP or third-party libraries.

9 – DooPHP

Doo is a PHP framework designed to give you a delightful development experience without slowing down you applications like most frameworks does. Doo tries to be as lightweight as possible and has a small source code footprint. The creator actually benchmarked various possible approaches when building a module and chooses the fastest for Doo.

Doo is easy to learn and use. You only need to know PHP and object-oriented programming. You are not forced to learn a new configuration or templating language.

10 – Tekuna

Tekuna is a compact framework for web-based applications. It provides a stable basis and a generic infrastructure for your projects. Tekuna has a very small footprint and will not pollute your codebase with unnecessary stuff.

11 – PRADO

PRADO is a component-based and event-driven programming framework for developing Web applications in PHP 5. PRADO stands for PHP Rapid Application Development Object-oriented.

The main intention to the development this framework is encourage PHP developers to use the PHP5 (truly Object Oriented) and also become this framework not only more one framework but a collaborative framework as already come being done considering the reuse of classes found in several places such as Phrame Frameowrk, PEAR repository and PHPClasses repository.

12 – BareBones

BareBones: a one-file, no-configuration, MVC framework for PHP5.

13 – WebMesh

WebMesh is a framework developed in PHP5 to serve of base for the creation of web applications. It offer an API with several abstractions to facilitate the application development and a MVC pattern (Model2) implementation using Smarty in the View.

The main intention to the development this framework is encourage PHP developers to use the PHP5 (truly Object Oriented) and also become this framework not only more one framework but a collaborative framework as already come being done considering the reuse of classes found in several places such as Phrame Frameowrk, PEAR repository and PHPClasses repository.

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Tags:framework, mvc, object-oriented, php5, web applications, zend