I’m always looking on how to develop faster and smart. So I started to hunt frameworks, and on the way I pushed aside Zend Framework because not only it takes time to set up the project, it also takes time to learn the APIs and their vision. It bugs me since ZF says its “configureless” but you need to follow really strict standards to put your project in motion, which takes time to do too since you got to plan what you want, how you want to do it, how it will interact ahead before starting with ZF. Unlike frameworks like CakePHP, CodeIgniter, just unzip, and start.
I’ll start on my topic now :) I usually read twitter, and write tweets too. I love twitter! And I stumbled with this link “Big List of PHP Frameworks” I started looking some of them, the list is really big, but for us, is it really productive to look for the RIGHT framework? I don’t think PHP Frameworks have reached a count of 100 yet. Sure, some of us have already sticked with one and won’t change (but that’s a bad habit :P you should try testing others on your free time)–which brings to question is it really worth checking them out one by one?
I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’ll be able to handle benchmarking each one and building a simple blog just to see how difficult it’ll be or checking how to configure it… or just stick with content management frameworks like Drupal and be done with it (which also have one annoying steep curve to learn it). In the end, I’ll stick with one that has a good documentation and a good community, lets say that the margin of being productive is down a few percents, but I still got my good documentation and a good community to ask.
Once again, check out the big list of PHP frameworks!
Zend Framework rocks, I can not see why you would not like it.
CodeIgniter Runs on PHP 4. This means it does not support objects very well and this means it is harder to use.
Sure any framework will do for a small project, but as a project grows, I be you will be wishing your selected framework was as easy as zend framework.
I didn’t say I don’t like it :) I said “pushed it aside” true I love zend framework and their vision but their over-engineering does make a hole in your application, and more if your application is not complex or have a small to intermediate set of features.
Not to mention zend framework mailing list support which is superb and Matthew Weier O’Phinney (project lead of ZF) also gives a hand too.
Although I wish there were more examples in ZF documentations
I’ve only used Zend, so I can’t speak for the others. I will say though that it’s library is great, however its framework is a little much (but there are bigger problems with MVC on the web anyway).
As for drawing comparisons, I found this link recently and found it much easier to digest: http://www.phpframeworks.com/