Best overall framework for PHP 5?

[Jasper Bekkers]

Two fundamental rules of code style guides:

1. Use the style guide your employer gave you.
2. If your employer doesn't have a style guide create one and use that.

This is a non-issue.

[dereko]

Two fundamental rules of code style guides:

1. Use the style guide your employer gave you.
2. If your employer doesn't have a style guide create one and use that.

This is a non-issue.

I would disagree. Anyone who uses camel case for a long time is going to defend their way of doing things but if you think about it objectively then clearly camel case is not the best way of doing things.

[wysiwyg]

dereko:
It would be nice to have an explaination to go with that objective statement.

[ahundiak]

Oh goody. We haven't had a nice camel case vs underscore flame war in months. Get the pop_corn out.

[tankbott]

Oh goody. We haven't had a nice camel case vs underscore flame war in months. Get the pop_corn out.

I think you mean, get the popCorn out.

[aedrin]

Oh goody. We haven't had a nice camel case vs underscore flame war in months. Get the pop_corn out.

There is a big difference between a flame war (a lot of negativity and name calling), and a discussion.

There is nothing wrong with the latter. Just because some people would rather figure out why X is better than Y (rather than just believing it straight off) doesn't mean that it's a flame war and pointless.

It's quite annoying to be discussing something, and someone comes in and calls it a flame war without adding anything useful to the conversation.

[aedrin]

dereko:
It would be nice to have an explaination to go with that objective statement.

I would like to see an explanation too.

[InFloW]

I think it's really a silly debate about camel case or not. Everyone has their preference depending on the language they came from and where they learned how to program. I like to use camel case because I came from a Java background but I have no issue with either. I'll use whichever is how a specific application's coding standards are set.

As for the best framework? Well I'm really taking a liking to Zend myself. I like to strip out all the slow parts and make a very fast system while making use of the powerful parts of ZF. None of these frameworks routers and controller systems are particularly fast. I can accomplish what I need in 1/10 of the time it takes them because I don't need some massive generic system.

[dimis283]

Having knowledge of jsp, studs took my attention.
Did any try that? Any opinion?

[xtazi]

Symfony is the best i agree with you too.

Here is the news for symfony lovers: Symfony 1.1 beta 3 was released this week, completing one of the last milestones before the final release of symfony 1.1. Meanwhile, symfony related jobs, blogs and posts about symfony and websites created with symfony continue blooming all around the world.

[BeeStar]

Codeigniter: really like the doc and simplicity. Worried about not allowing multiple views though.

CodeIgniter supports multiple views since January 30, 2008 (version 1.6.0).
Thought you might want to know.


Bee

[dimis283]

I use CI for a demo site, I like it for the simplicity and the good documentation.
The next step will be the Cakephp but I read at forums that ther is no support for pdo (really?).
I also read this!

[GeertDD]

I'm reading way too much about CodeIgniter (PHP4) in this topic, and way too little about Kohana (PHP5). Kohana really takes advantage of PHP5 OOP and has a much cleaner source code. It takes a very flexible MVC approach.

By the way, yesterday Kohana 2.2 got released. Go play around with it.

[praetor]

IMHO, Symfony is the most complete framework for php.

[BeeStar]

I'm reading way too much about CodeIgniter (PHP4) in this topic, and way too little about Kohana (PHP5). Kohana really takes advantage of PHP5 OOP and has a much cleaner source code. It takes a very flexible MVC approach.

I'm using CI for an application that will have a long life span. Therefore, the quality as well as the ongoing development and support is crucial.

I love Kohana's PHP5 only approach. CI's PHP4 style is sooooo 2004. However, CodeIgniter's documentation is exellent and support and development has proven to be stable.

Kohana is pretty young. It seems to be written by a younger person than Rick Ellis and I am not yet convinced that "Shadowhand" has the stamina to develop Kohana for a long time. I cannot afford to develop an application based on a frame work only to discover after a year that the original developer has left the project and development stalls.
I haven't looked at the code, so I don't know what quality Kohana has in that respect.

So yes, Kohana is very promising, and I keep having it on my radar. But I will wait at least a year before I touch it.


Bee

[GeertDD]

I love Kohana's PHP5 only approach. CI's PHP4 style is sooooo 2004.

PHP4 is dead. You love PHP5. Why still stick with it then?

However, CodeIgniter's documentation is exellent

Agreed. Documentation is CodeIgniter's strongest point. Kohana is working, and will have to work, on this point. You are always welcome to ask for support in the forum.

CI development has proven to be stable.

Stable development has both its good and bad points. I believe CI updates will rarely break backwards compatibility. Kohana, on the other hand, has had quite some API changes that force you to update your code. Implemented improvements will not carry on old code with them.

Quote from Shadowhand: "Kohana is, and probably always will be, rapidly changing. When we find a better way to do something, we don't sit on our hands and go 'Oh, that's interested, maybe we can use that someday.' We attempt to implement it, and usually, it's a massive step in the right direction."

CI updates are too slow, in my opinion. When I was still using CI I created many optimization topics in their forum. However, generally it took months before they got implemented. Even very straightforward improvements, like dropping the built-in human_to_unix() date helper function, which is horribly long and slow, for PHP's native strtotime() has not been implemented even today, ouch (see this topic).

Kohana is pretty young. It seems to be written by a younger person than Rick Ellis

Age of the developer(s) sounds like a non-argument to me.

I am not yet convinced that "Shadowhand" has the stamina to develop Kohana for a long time. I cannot afford to develop an application based on a frame work only to discover after a year that the original developer has left the project and development stalls.

Fair enough. This is definitely something you should take into consideration when picking a framework. Of course, I cannot reply in Shadowhand's name (Woody), but I have been working on Kohana with him for more than a year now and he is definitely a guy who knows his stuff. I do not think he is going anywhere soon. Moreover, Kohana gets support from many more developers.

I haven't looked at the code, so I don't know what quality Kohana has in that respect.

Please, do look at the code. I would gladly let the code do the talking.

[greg.harvey]

Symfony looks good, but doesn't seem to have a large enough community yet. I use Drupal for this sort of thing. It's worth noting Drupal 6.x was in the final three for Best Business Application at the LinuxWorld awards this year - Symfony doesn't even get a mention. People think of Drupal as a CMS but it is not. It's every bit a framework, as it's awards nomination tells you.

Note, industry adoption is every bit as important as elegance, and good as Symfony may appear (and I do like what I've seen) it does not have adoption yet, and it may never. Drupal, conversely, is very well adopted, industry recognised and getting stronger all the time.

[BeeStar]

@GeertDD:

Of course PHP4 is dead. I don't use PHP4. I run CI on PHP5. My coding style is PHP5. Except for CI's function calls... ;-)

The reason the documentation is crucial is it helps getting my job done. When I program, I want to be able to quickly look up something and continue coding. Forums are great of course, but take too much time for a simple API question.

I agree 100% that it takes way too much time to get an improvement into CI.

Allow me to explain my age remark. In general, I repeat: in general, young developers tend to want to do cool things in code, older (35+) developers tend to know that doing cool things is not enough to make a cool application, but other things are as important. Like being able to read your own code after two months, not breaking the API every release, maintainability, etc.

I am glad that Kohana is still developed actively, and I am impressed with the speed. Also the site seems to get more content. CI's documentation is easier on the eyes (fonts, headings, colours), so I can quickly find what I need. It would be nice if Kohana's upcoming documentation would also have a pleasant look.

I had a quick glance at the code and I am impressed. This is what I dream of what CI could be!


Conclusion:
Sometimes "okay" is good enough. CI has it quirks, but currently it works for me. I am in the middle of developing for a new release, so my first priority is getting the work done, get the code stable and release the thing.

Since it's a young application, more features are important right now. But as I said in my previous post, when my dust settles a bit, and Kohana's API is stable enough and it's documentation/forums with good search functionality allows me to quickly find what I need, and the community has grown stronger, I will look at Kohana again.

I am afraid however that the migration from CodeIgniter to Kohana will be a lot of work... I couldn't find a CodeIgniter-->Kohana migration tutorial. Would be very nice!


Bee

[lovelycesar]

There is no best PHP framework. I read somewhere that it should not use PHP frameworks as recommended by PHP's fathers.

[greg.harvey]

There is no best PHP framework. I read somewhere that it should not use PHP frameworks as recommended by PHP's fathers.

OMG, I just wasted the last two years!!!

[greg.harvey]

Allow me to explain my age remark. In general, I repeat: in general, young developers tend to want to do cool things in code, older (35+) developers tend to know that doing cool things is not enough to make a cool application, but other things are as important. Like being able to read your own code after two months, not breaking the API every release, maintainability, etc.

+1

Wise words.

[dvddesign]

The main problem is learning those framework is not that easy mainly
becoz of documentation like cakephp has horrible /unmaintained documentation.

another problem is this framework API change so frequently , you cannot follow
one tutorial completely...you will find that those are not working ..
it mainly happend bcoz there is a learning curve invlove...and when you get idea how to do it ..
API is droped/changed ..now go to the horrible document and find it ..

Its now like Linux ..more than one distribution ...if the configuration work in redhat it may not work in Dabian..and when you fix it ..the client come with openbsd!!.

[greg.harvey]

Depends on the framework. Drupal typically changes once every couple of years, the changes are gently introduced and (usually) an improvement. Besides, if an API is obliged to support old methods then the maintenance overhead for the framework team becomes unmanageable. It's one of Microsoft's biggest issues. How do you make software that worked on Windows 95 still work on Windows Vista? So much time and energy is wasted supporting a legacy API, but Microsoft have stitched themselves up with policy decisions made 20 years ago. Many frameworks deliberately do *not* make their APIs backwards compatible to avoid the Microsoft connundrum. I think they are correct to do so. Apart from anything else, it allows you to give the code a good spring clean every once in a while.

[dvddesign]

there is a huge gap between 95 to vista anyway !
the way the framwork change is too fast ...most of the time
they totaly change everithing ...like joomla 1.3 -->1.5 and as they are opensource
..everyone know about its security problem so developer forced to learn new api
to be secure .
End of the day ...need to be update first and less doc make it harder .

As most of them free ..people has lots of choice ..some want joomla..some want drupal..
cake..zend ..codeig ..
If one become expert in joomla ..client will come and want in drupal ..oscommerce .
To work in any framework ..it need very vast knowledge like templete, component ..pluging coding ...
..harder ..bcoz of less time