Popular PHP Application Development Frameworks

Among the wide-spread frameworks that PHP web application developers use, Zend, CakePHP, Yii are probably the most popular ones. Each of them has peculiar features and its own PHP development community and supporters.

Zend Framework is a PHP framework created and supported by Zend Company whose developers are the authors of PHP language itself. Zend framework is suitable for PHP software developers to create reliable, safe and up-to-date Web 2.0 applications and web services.  The creators of the framework follow the traditions of the PHP language – simplicity, object-oriented principles, friendly license and the well tested code using agile methods.

CakePHP framework is ideal for small and medium sized PHP projects and solutions. It makes use of such well-known design patterns like Front Controller, Association Data Mapping, MVC and ActiveRecord. Components, behavior and helper classes give an opportunity for expanding and multiple using for adding functional to the base classes in applications. 

Peculiarities of CakePHP application development framework

• Its own file structure
• Plug-in support
• Data abstraction (PEAR::DB, ADOdb, Cake)
• DBMS support (Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle)
• Complete compatibility with PHP4 and PHP5.

Yii framework is a new rapid PHP application development framework, completely object-oriented, with good documentation and large community. PHP software developers use Yii framework for creating highly productive and up-to-date Web 2.0 applications. Those PHP web developers who are acquainted with Prado framework, have no problems in understanding this framework.  According to the results of framework productivity, Yii Framework is the fastest of all popular PHP frameworks. 

There are many reasons why PHP software developers consider using frameworks to be more effective but the main one is the speed of development. Frameworks save PHP application development time, help PHP web developers in creating stable applications and reduce the amount of repeated code. And that’s the most important in modern web application development and creating complicated dynamic sites and business applications.