These days, Website Developer, Designer or Programmer asks a common question all the time-“Which framework is best for PHP?“. Because of availability of various frameworks like CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Zend, Symfony, Yii, etc., my answer is- its depends on following points(or we have to consider following points):
- What is my application going to do?
- which framework has a stable community?
- which framework has a good resource available?
- which framework is under solid development phase and not in “discontinued” mode?
Once you have the answer, you need to know that there are basically three types of framework though they offer MVC or HMVC work flow.
- Some frameworks are liberal.
- Some frameworks are too strict.
- Some of them are over strict and configuration junky.
Take a look, Codeigniter, It is extremely liberal, allowed me to write bad code. means we can called model inside view. Its a very light weight and good for small project or application.
Now take a look on CakePHP, as per conventions it is strict type. But as per standard and as a requirement for big application, it fits.
Take a look on Symfony, its a moving into strict and configuration junky type.
in short, if you are a beginner with MVC and want to learn a framework from the heart, start with Zend Framework or CakePHP. Soon you will realize that you may not have to move or use any other framework unless the situation requires it. Saying that, there are other very good frameworks out there like Yii, CodeIgniter and Kohana etc.
