This is a topic that is not very well understood by people who jump into development pool.
PHP frameworks help to promote rapid application development, which saves you time, helps build more stable applications, and reduces the amount of repetitive coding for developers. Frameworks can also help beginners to build more stable apps by ensuring proper database interaction and coding on the presentation layer. This allows you to spend more time creating the actual web application, instead of spending time writing repetitive code and writing the tools for your project.
PHP frameworks help to promote rapid application development, which saves you time, helps build more stable applications, and reduces the amount of repetitive coding for developers. Frameworks can also help beginners to build more stable apps by ensuring proper database interaction and coding on the presentation layer. This allows you to spend more time creating the actual web application, instead of spending time writing repetitive code and writing the tools for your project.
Why should one use a PHP framework ?
Developers should utilize PHP frameworks for various reasons, but the number one reason is for speeding up the development process. Reusing code across similar projects will save the developer a substantial amount of time and effort.
Why should we not use a PHP framework ?
- You will learn a lot of stuff by writing your own pieces of code. I have been working like that and I have learned a lot of different things about PHP that I did not know before.
- There are a lot of things in frameworks that you do not need and by making your own you can get only whatever you want and use in your project.
- Think about all of the settings that the other frameworks have to go through when loading and the database queries that involves. You save yourself all of that loading by writing code from scratch.
- If you are going to make a small project, such as a simple portfolio website, then a framework would just be more work than necessary. You can choose then to write raw php code.
5 of the best php frameworks for web developers.
1) Symfony
Symfony is a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP 5. It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing Symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise.
Read more about this framework here.
2) Zend Framework
Zend Framework 2 is an open source framework for developing web applications and services using PHP 5.3+. Zend Framework 2 uses 100% object-oriented code and uses most of the new features of PHP 5.3, namely namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions and closures. Zend Framework 2 evolved from Zend Framework 1, a successful PHP framework with over 15 million downloads.
Read more about this framework here.
3) Yii Framework
Yii is a high-performance PHP framework best for developing Web 2.0 applications.
Yii comes with rich features: MVC, DAO/ActiveRecord, I18N/L10N, caching, authentication and role-based access control, scaffolding, testing, etc. It can reduce your development time significantly.
Read more about this framework here.
4) CakePHP
CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications.
Read more about this framework here.
5) CodeIgniter
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.
Read more about this framework here.
Conclusion
Bottom line, you should check the situation and make a good analysis before starting to use a php framework in your project. It is better to understand what advantages gives you a framework, check your project, see if you will save time not writing that stuff, and then decide if you use it or not.
