This is really what I needed to fix the wiki for. For now, the blog is the wiki. I’ll put it on my list for tomorrow.
Currently hyped frameworks:
Others that seem to have lost their buzz:
Ones that seem to be abandoned:
PHPonTrax is probably the closest to using rails you can get on PHP, since their unabashed goal is to imitate Rails on PHP. Unfortunately, that means they lean on Rails for documentation.
Ironically, I don’t like Symfony so much because it seems *too* like rails, which is confusing because of it’s differences. Symfony’s claim to integrate with Drupal would seem appealing, but I actually want to avoid working with Drupal or Joomla. I suppose if I ever have customers that need CMS I’ll change my mind. Symfony’s AJAX support and documentation are tempting, but I’m a bit worried it’s heavyweight.
CakePHP was too big to bite off and chew. I started working on the Cake attachments module a couple months ago, but sadly abandoned it because I didn’t want to delve that deeply into Cake at the time. David Persson is the maintainer, and a nice guy. I owe him some code… someday. I read somewhere that Joomla is being rewritten with CakePHP, so that makes
Seagull has gotten a lot of good comments, but I don’t know anyone who’s actually using it. Like probably everyone else, it’s on my todo list to review it.
WACT had a lot of steam a couple years ago, but seems to have died out. Maybe not, but the buzz has faded, so if you’re a happy WACT user, I’d like to know. WACT was, I believe, developed by whoever’s behind PHPatterns.com and was a good early example of using PHP as a serious programming language.
I used to have hopes for BinaryCloud, but it never seemed to materialize.
Mojavi was on my must look at list a couple years ago, but appears abandoned. Agavi is a fork of Mojavi that seems more active, but seems to have lost it’s thunder to new Rails-inspired MVC frameworks.
CodeIgniter seems popular with the “get it done” PHP crowd who don’t really care for design patterns and heavyweight frameworks. I’m looking for something more disciplined (or disciplining.)
Zend Framework has good design behind it and tries to stay out of your way. Folks trust, for example, it’s modules for forms, auth, email, etc. mostly because it comes from Zend. It may be a good bet. I’m more likely to trust it, even if it’s not mature than someone’s CakePHP authentication, for example. Nothing against Cake, of course.
Prado has strong adherents, but it’s code behind model doesn’t win many converts in the LAMP camp.
Xoops is kind of a portal / CMS and a bit confusing at first but nice to use, but is fairly self-contained. I don’t like how it stuffs content into the DB.
Here’s a fairly exhaustive list, though somewhat out of date:
http://www.phpwact.org/php/mvc_frameworks
There are several comparisons out there in various forms of outdatedness- a google search brought up at least 10 for me: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=php+framework+comparison&btnG=Google+Search.
As the project lead for Zend Framework, I thought I’d just chime in here to mention that ZF 1.5 changes the picture for Zend Framework pretty significantly. With forms support and AJAX-enabled form elements, we’re really working on building out our AJAX proposition. Also, we’re trying to really peg the Identity 2.0 technologies with our OpenID and InfoCard components. Finally, we’re introducing an extensible CLI tool that will provide the code generation/project skeletons that many have considered a must-have for modern frameworks. What I like best about this new CLI component is that it follows our use-at-will architecture just like every other component, so you can continue to use ZF as a collection of loosely coupled components if you prefer. I can tell you for a fact that one of the first questions that comes up in any ZF design is how we can give our users the best of both worlds.
,Wil
Thank you for this interesting article ! A useful list of web frameworks (PHP, but also Python, Ruby, Java…) can be found at http://www.therightsoft.com/softwaretechnologies/webframeworks/