Best Web-Frameworks

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.

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.

Symfony is a web application framework for PHP projects.

It aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications, and to replace the repetitive coding tasks by power, control and pleasure.

The very small number of prerequisites make symfony easy to install on any configuration; you just need Unix or Windows with a web server and PHP installed. It is compatible with almost every database system. In addition, it has a very small overhead, so the benefits of the framework don't come at the cost of an increase of hosting costs.

Using symfony is so natural and easy for people used to PHP and the design patterns of Internet applications that the learning curve is reduced to less than a day. The clean design and code readability will keep your delays short. Developers can apply agile development principles (such as DRY, KISS or the XP philosophy) and focus on applicative logic without losing time to write endless XML configuration files.

Symfony is aimed at building robust applications in an enterprise context. This means that you have full control over the configuration: from the directory structure to the foreign libraries, almost everything can be customized. To match your enterprise's development guidelines, symfony is bundled with additional tools helping you to test, debug and document your project.

Last but not least, by choosing symfony you get the benefits of an active open-source community. It is entirely free and published

under the MIT license. Symfony is sponsored by Sensio Labs, a French Web Agency well known for its innovative views on web development.

At a Glance

• Compatible with as many environments as possible
• Easy to install and configure
• Simple to learn
• Enterprise ready
• Convention rather than configuration, supporting fallback calls
• Simple in most cases, but still flexible enough to adapt to complex cases
• Most common web features included
• Compliant with most of the web "bests pratices" and with web "design patterns"
• Very readable code with easy maintenance
• Open-Source

Source: symfony

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.

CodeIgniter is right for you if:

• You want a framework with a small footprint
• You need exceptional performance
• You need broad compatibility with standard hosting accounts that run a variety of PHP versions and configurations
• You want a framework that requires nearly zero configuration
• You want a framework that does not require you to use the command line
• You want a framework that does not require you to adhere to restrictive coding rules
• You are not interested in large-scale monolithic libraries like PEAR
• You do not want to be forced to learn a templating language (although a template parser is optionally available if you desire one)
• You eschew complexity, favoring simple solutions
• You need clear, thorough documentation

Source: CodeIgniter

Seagull is a mature OOP framework for building web, command line and GUI applications. Licensed under BSD, the project allows PHP developers to easily integrate and manage code resources, and build complex applications quickly.

Many popular PHP applications are already seamlessly integrated within the project, as are various templating engines, testing tools and managed library code. If you're a beginner, the framework provides a number of sample applications that can be customised and extended to suit your needs. If you're an intermediate or advanced developer, take advantage of Seagull's best practices, standards and modular codebase to build your applications in record time.

Once your development cycle is complete, use Seagull's features for deploying and maintaining your apps locally and remotely. Check out the friendly and active Seagull community and see if Seagull's a good fit for you.

Features

Check out the screenshots page to see Seagull in action. Or compare the features list with your current framework/CMS. Seagull offers the following key features:

• PHP 4/5 compatible
• Compact core framework with basic CMS and other modules included to get you started
• Ease of use: learning curve not as steep as other frameworks
• Enterprise ready, performance conscious design
• Light integration with PEAR libraries, great for prototyping complex projects
• Integrated ORM for RAD
• Highly configurable, easy to integrate with 3rd party code
• Community support: the project enjoys participation from a large and active developer community
• Loosely coupled components, use template engine of your choice, output to multiple devices or CLI
• Staying power: started in 2001, the Seagull project has been steadily growing in popularity and now enjoys international recognition

License

The Seagull core is licensed under BSD and is free to use in Open Source and closed commercial projects.

You must however maintain the original copyright notice as described in the license. The BSD license gives the enduser much greater freedom to use the software than any of the GPL family and its derivatives.

Source: Seagull

PRADO^TM 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.

History

The very original inspiration of PRADO came from Apache Tapestry. During the design and implementation, I borrowed many ideas from Borland Delphi and Microsoft ASP.NET. The first version of PRADO came out in June 2004 and was written in PHP 4. Driven by the Zend PHP 5 coding contest, I rewrote PRADO in PHP 5, which proved to be a wise move, thanks to the new object model provided by PHP 5. PRADO won the grand prize in the Zend contest, earning high votes both from the public and from the judges' panel.

In August 2004, PRADO was hosted on SourceForge as an open source project. Soon after, the project site xisc.com was announced to public. With the fantastic support of PRADO developer team and PRADO users, PRADO evolved to version 2.0 in mid 2005. In this version, Wei Zhuo contributed to PRADO with the excellent I18 and L10N support.

In May 2005, we decided to completely rewrite the PRADO framework to resolve a few fundamental issues found in version 2.0 and to catch up with some cool features available in Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0. After nearly a year's hard work with over 50,000 lines of new code, version 3.0 was finally made available in April 2006.

Starting from version 3.0, significant efforts are allocated to ensure the quality and stability of PRADO. If we say PRADO v2.x and v1.x are proof-of-concept work, we can say PRADO 3.x has grown up to a serious project that is suitable for business application development.

Main Features

• Object-oriented and highly reusable code
• Event-driven programming
• Separation of presentation and logic
• Configurable and pluggable modular architecture
• Full spectrum of database support
• Feature-rich Web components: HTML input controls, validators, datagrid, wizard...
• AJAX-enabled Web components
• Built-in support of internationalization (I18N) and localization (L10N)
• Customizable and localizable error/exception handling
• Multiway message logging with filters
• Generic caching modules and selective output caching
• Extensible authentication and authorization framework
• Security measures: cross-site script (XSS) prevention, cookie protection...
• XHTML compliance
• Rich documentation and strong userbase

Source: Prado

Solar is a web application framework for PHP 5. It uses concepts derived from the Savant template system, the DB_Table object-relation management package, and the organizational structure of PEAR.

Solar is the brainchild of Paul M. Jones who winkingly calls himself the "Benevolent Dictator" of the Solar system. Other developers are working on additional components for the standard project distribution package, all under the New BSD license.

Why Use Solar?

• Elegant and consistent: the code base itself is easy to comprehend, adheres to well-documented naming conventions, and exhibits strong conceptual integrity.
• Full name-spacing: Solar classes have their own PHP 5.2 name-space, and vendors developing to Solar standards also use their own name-space. This makes it easy to mix and match components from other libraries and frameworks.
• Inheritable configuration by class: Set a value in the config file for one class, and all its children inherit those values by default.
• Inheritable localization by class: Set the locale strings for a class, and all its children inherit those strings.
• Easy-to use defense-in-depth against SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other common exploits.
• Sane and extensible data filtering to validate and sanitize user input.
• Authentication adapters for LDAP, TypeKey, database, htpasswd, and other sources.
• Cache adapters for memcache, APC, XCache, and other systems.
• View helpers for links, images, stylesheets, localized text, form generation, and more.
• Active and friendly community: Join the mailing list and IRC where we make it point to be nice.
• Thorough integration of enterprise development patterns, such as:
  • Data Mapper
  • Dependency Injection and Service Locator
  • Lazy Load
  • Model View Controller
  • Query Object
  • Registry
  • Server Session State

Source: Solar

eZ Components is a high-quality library of independent components that aid in the development of Web-centric applications.

Powerful and Independent

eZ Components is engineered with a full feature set in mind, providing you with powerful building blocks for your application.

Each component is also completely independent from the other components, which allows you to choose exactly which parts of the library you want to use in your application. The eZ Components library does not dictate how you organize your application; instead, it provides you with the flexibility to decide how and when to use each component. In addition, all of the components' APIs are engineered in a similar way, making them as consistent as possible.

Effective and High Quality

A library's usefulness stems from its individual components. Each eZ Component focuses its attention on solving important parts of Web application development. The components are lean and effective, created to solve specific recurring issues that developers face.

Quality is of utmost importance. The eZ Components development team uses a test-driven development methodology that maximizes API usability. This results in a robust and reliable API.

Easily Accessible, Open Source, Company-Backed

Documentation is what makes working with a components library such as eZ Components accessible. Good documentation is extremely valuable because it enables developers to get the most out of the library. For each of the components, the documentation includes a tutorial that introduces the API and gives an overview of the functionality, as well as a thorough API reference specification. Additionally, articles build on top of the documentation to provide more in-depth information about specific components.

eZ Components is published under an open license model. The New BSD license is very permissive and opens up the use of the library to as many developers as possible. An open source license also facilitates stronger community involvement.

All of the development processes are well-documented and made as transparent as possible for users and external contributors. The eZ Components team is responsible for code and project maintenance and oversees that the development processes are followed. Users are thus assured that eZ Components can be counted on for ongoing quality, relevance, and usefulness.

Source: eZ Components

Kohana is a PHP 5 framework that uses the Model View Controller architectural pattern. It aims to be secure, lightweight, and easy to use.

Features

• Highly secure
• Extremely lightweight
• Short learning curve
• Uses the MVC pattern
• 100% UTF-8 compatible
• Loosely coupled architecture
• Extremely easy to extend

Technology

• Strict PHP 5 OOP
• Simple database abstraction using SQL helpers
• Multiple session drivers (native, database, and cookie)
• Powerful event handler allows small modifications dynamically
• Originally based on CodeIgniter

How is Kohana Different?

Although Kohana reuses many common design patterns and concepts, there are some things that make Kohana stand out:

• Community, not company, driven. Kohana development is driven by a team of dedicated people that need a framework for fast, powerful solutions.
• Strict PHP 5 OOP. Offers many benefits: visibility protection, automatic class loading, overloading, interfaces, abstracts, and singletons.
• Extremely lightweight. Kohana has no dependencies on PECL extensions or PEAR libraries. Large, monolithic libraries are avoided in favor of optimized solutions.
• GET, POST, COOKIE, and SESSION arrays all work as expected. Kohana does not limit your access to global data, but offers filtering and XSS protection.
• True auto-loading of classes. True on-demand loading of classes, as they are requested in your application.
• No namespace conflicts. All classes are suffixed to allow similar names between components, for a more coherent API.
• Cascading resources offer unparalleled extensibility. Almost every part of Kohana can be overloaded or extended without editing core system files. Modules allow multi-file plugins to be added to your application, transparently.
• Library drivers and API consistency. Libraries can use different "drivers" to handle different external APIs transparently. For example, multiple session storage options are available (database, cookie, and native), but the same interface is used for all of them. This allows new drivers to be developed for existing libraries, which keeps the API consistent and transparent.
• Powerful event handler. Observer-style event handlers allow for extreme levels of customization potential.
• Rapid development cycle. Rapid development results in faster response to user bugs and requests.

Source: Kohana

Jelix is an open-source PHP5 framework which help you to develop any kind of web applications:

• Designed for both little web sites and and huge-loaded web sites.
• Fully object oriented, highly modular and extensible.
• Made on known design pattern: MVC, DAO..
• Support natively many output format: XHTML, XUL, RSS, ATOM, RDF, ZIP, XML, PDF, etc.
• Make web services developement easier : XML-RPC, JSON, and other Ajax stuffs.
• Include a powerful form system to create all kind of forms, including CRUD forms.
• Include many more other features...

Source: Jelix

It can change the way you work. It gives you fast results. It is a reliable foundation for complex applications. And it is backed by one of the biggest PHP communities.

We created FLOW3 as the foundation for the upcoming major version of TYPO3 (code name Phoenix). Now you can use our framework too, to build your own applications where code libraries lack an overall concept or a CMS would not fit the bill.

FLOW3 brings new concepts to the PHP world. Domain-Driven Design, Dependency Injection and Aspect-Oriented Programming are some of them. And besides some great features we offer a new view on the "how" of software development.

It's about efficiency. It's about the beauty of code. And it's a lot of fun.

Source: Flow3

MODx helps you take control of your online content. An Open Source Content Management Framework, it frees you to build sites exactly how you want and make them 100% yours. Zero restrictions and fast to build. Super-simple templates in HTML/CSS/JS (any lib you want). Registered user systems and a killer community. Welcome to web-building nirvana.

Designers' introduction

Finally, go straight from XHTML/CSS/JS mockup right into the Content Management System.

We don't think you should have to buy a book to build amazing sites that look and behave exactly how you want. And we mean exactly, with no forced columns, blocks or zones to hack up. Just total, complete, unadulterated creative freedom … the way it should be.

Developer overview

Make sites your clients can actually run with just an hour of training, and without breaking the site.

MODx Revolution is a powerful PHP Content Management Framework that plays nicely with custom code and helps you build sites faster and maintain them with ease. With Revolution you'll leverage the best things to come around since MVC and Active Record.

Source: MODx

Sapphire is an object-oriented PHP5 web framework designed to let you focus on your data and business logic.

Everything you make in Sapphire can be broken down into modules. This includes all the code, templates, and even configuration files. With extensions (aka mix-ins), you can make modules that modify the behaviour of other, more core, modules. The end result: a framework that is perfect for creating modular, reusable code.

Source: Sapphire

P4A is probably the best PHP5 RAD and object oriented PHP framework for building event-driven stateful web applications. It is based on Zend Framework and features tableless HTML, multiple databases, accesskey support, auto data type recognition, transparent AJAX, UTF-8, i18n/l10n.

P4A is a PHP framework, a software containing libraries, modules and widgets used to build applications that will be used with a web browser connected to the net. With P4A you’ll be able to develop web applications writing code as you would do with the most evolved rapid development tools. The result will be an application that the user will use with the same feeling that he would have with a classical client application. You won’t have to worry about creating the graphic interface for your projects because P4A includes a nice and clean graphical theme.

Source: PHP for Application

Yii is a high-performance component-based PHP framework for developing large-scale Web applications. Yii enables maximum reusability in Web programming and can significantly accelerate the development process. The name Yii stands for easy, efficient and extensible.

Source: Yii

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

It’s inspired by frameworks like Sinatra or Camping in Ruby, or Orbit in Lua. It aims to be simple, lightweight and extremly flexible.

Limonade provides functions that complete the PHP basic set, while keeping consistency with native functions and sitting up on them. Limonade is easy to learn and provides everything that you can expect from a modern framework (MVC, REST, …)

Source: Limonade

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.

Tekuna's Features

• Component-oriented Definition of the Application
• Intuitive Routing of Actions to Controllers
• Friendly URLs with URI Routing
• MVC Architecure
• PHP Error handling with Exceptions (and thus catchable)
• Separate Request and Response Objects
• Strict Input Filtering
• Eliminating the Effects of Magic Quotes
• Full UTF-8 Support
• Support for multiple Template Engines
• Simple Multilanguage Support

Non-functional Features

• It's Open Source
• Small Codebase with about 3000 SLOC
• Provides a generic Project Structure
• Improves Reusability
• Fully Unit-tested
• 100% E_STRICT and E_DEPRECATED Compliant (Produces no Errors, Warnings or Notices)
• Supports PHP 5.3
• Combinable with many other Frameworks (e.g. other Templating, ORM, Unit-Testing)
• Object-Oriented Architecture
• Geared to Java Programming and Naming Style

Source: Tekuna

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.

Source: DooPHP