PHP Frameworks That Will Make Your Life Easier

By John Kim | October 19th, 2010

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For years, I’ve been writing web applications from scratch, and I can only compare this to climbing Mount Everest. The time wasted doing tedious coding tasks is enough to make me run and jump out a window. Luckily for me, I discovered the magical world of Frameworks which essentially eliminates the need for writing repetitive code. Instead of writing the same old code over and over again, your focus can be left for the Logic and GUI aspect of development. There is literally a framework for every aspect of your programming life, and most of them follow the very clean MVC design pattern that will leave you with nice, extensible code.

So for those of you still confused about frameworks, well it basically supports the development of a website, web application, and web services. Frameworks allows for the access of database functions, templating, session management, and promotes code reuse. As a PHP developer I’m more interested in PHP Frameworks, so below is a list of some widely used PHP Frameworks. It will be up to you to determine which one will prevent you from jumping out windows like the Hulk.

Codeigniter: built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full featured web applications. For developers who are stuck with tight deadlines and finicky clients.

Cakephp: used for rapid development using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM. Cakephp reduces development cost by reducing code that developers need to write.

Yiiframework: Used for developing large-scale web applications. Yii stand for easy, efficient, and extensible.

Akelos: Based on the Model View Controller Design pattern. It allows to write ‘Views’ using AJAX, control requests and response through a controller, manage internationalized applications, communicate models, and database using simple conventions.

Phpdevshell: A ready made GUI where you can start the development work that matters most, the web application. It provides user registration and management, role management, group management, access rights security, system settings, templates, control panels, cronjob management, menu management, plug-in management etc.

Zend: It’s a PHP framework that is based on simplicity, object-oriented best practices, corporate friendly licensing, and well tested code base. It’s focus is on building reliable web 2.0 applications and has API’s provided by some of the big names such as Google, Yahoo, and Flickr.

Pradosoft: Has component-based and event-driven programming framework for PHP5. PRADO stands for PHP Rapid Application Development Object-oriented. It separates the HTML view from the server processes.

Symfony: Has a library of cohesive classes written in PHP, and it allows developers to write complex applications faster.

Seagullproject: This object oriented programming framework is used to build web, command line and GUI applications. It allows PHP developers to easily manage code, and build complex applications fast.

Zoopframework: This PHP framework is designed to be efficient, modular, and extensible and allows for lightweight and fully featured web applications.

Kohana: A PHP5 framework that provides a rich set of components for building web applications. It supports UTF-8 and i18n, and provides tons of tools that developers will need within a extremely flexible system. Some of the features is the integrated class auto-loading, cascading file system, highly consistent API, and easy integration with libraries from vendors for large or small projects.

Limb: Limb is a LGPL which stands for Library of Interdependent Modules and Blocks. It’s aim is to provide you with modules and blocks used for rapid web application prototyping and development for PHP5. It has tons of components to choose from, and you can cherry pick the ones you will use for your application. This is great for a web application that you already have, but want to add some more features to it.

AjaxAC: An open-source PHP framework used to develop/create/generate Ajax applications. The pain of creating Ajax applications from the ground up is now gone.

Qcodo: Frees developers from tedious, mundane coding. This PHP framework is used by the most highly trafficked websites such as Lockheed Martin and Hewlett-Packard.

Blueshoes: A comprehensive framework/content management system. BlueShoes offers excellent support for MySQL, Oracle, and MSSQL.

Maintainable: Another PHP framework based around the MVC design pattern, and takes inspiration from Ruby on Rails. Although not appropriate for every application, it has a comprehensive test suite to get you on the right track.

Evocore: One of the few PHP frameworks that works well with PHP4 in order to guarantee your application can be hosted by any web hosting company. Great for the cheapskate inside of you.

Phocoa: Makes development for PHP easier, faster, and without substituting quality. Most of the dirty work is handled by the framework by providing you with a solid infrastructure. The bulk of your time will be spent writing GUI and logic for the application, a great time saver.

Solarphp: A PHP framework that uses enterprise application design patterns, so it’s very heavy duty. The code base is easy to read, and has a well documented naming conventions.