Thursday, 7 December 2017

Top PHP Web Framework of 2017-18

Nowdays there is demand of the most complex websites and lot of features within limited time. With this the use of  PHP web frameworks is increasing with every year. These days developers have to built complicated websites demanding a lot of complex coding , hence came the need for ordered way of development.


PHP provides developers with an adequate solution where not much complex coding is required. For this we discuss here the Top 7 PHP Web Frameworks to learn about in 2017 along with their features, advantages, disadvantages, their ranking by popularity, ease of use :

1. Laravel –It is the most popular in the PHP association and even in the web development association in general. The creators have said that they aim to make web development  enjoyable with stylish appearance without sacrificing quality. Some frameworks are geared towards small projects some are enterprise level, Laravel is actually a great choice for either one, applications of any size.

The built-in authentication is incredible , it uses blade templating which is very easy and powerful. It’s much cleaner than writing raw SQL queries although you can do that with standard DB library, it also uses artisan which is a command line for doing all kind of things such as generating models, controllers, providers. It can run database migrations, display routes and much much more.

2. Symfony– Ideal for enterprise level applications which is used a lot in the corporate world along with then danny2 , it is also used by one of the most efficient projects such as Drupal , which manages the content of  websites and  creates it and  is a popular forum platform, it is known for utilizing reusable components which makes development much faster than using something like Zen components.

It can be installed using composer which is PHP dependency manager. It is one of the fastest frameworks of its size, it’s also very easy to use different databases with your applications such as MySQL or Postgres or even no SQL.

3. CodeIgniter – A mature framework where use of  MVC is not needed, it forces you to learn certain things which you wouldn’t learn other frameworks.
Here you have to type codes instead of command line utility to generate things. Another plus is how easy you can deploy, you can buy $5 per month shared hosting account and just FTP your files then connect to a database and your site is going to be deployed.

It also outperforms many of the other frameworks, it’s very light around 2 megabytes and it has very good documentation and support.

4. Phalcon PHP- Labeled as the fastest PHP framework reason being it's based as a C extension, written in C and C++ which is great for managing system resources, it uses very low memory and also CPU consumption is low, it has a very low auto loading mechanism which follows psr-4 which is a specification for loading classes from file paths, its also very secure with a lot of built-in features.

5. Cake PHP – Released in 2005 very mature and stable, when it comes to rapid development and prototyping, this framework is definitely at the top, it uses scaffholding which analyzes and modifies the databases, we can create crud applications extremely quickly it's very secure and has CSRF support which protects against things like cross site scripting. Companies like BMW and Hyundai have used this framework in their platforms. It doesn't has complex configuration settings which make the developers easy to understand and develop.

6. Slim- Classified as a micro framework and one of the lightest popular PHP framework. If we are doing a top list of frameworks for building rest APIs then Slim would be at the top, the way it handles routes and HTTP and middleware there is no js and express. It also supports encrypted cookies, flash messaging , templates and much more. It has a very little overhead.

7. Zend- It’s a decade old and arguably the most popular framework for enterprise level applications. Big companies like BBC and Cisco use Zend on downsides and its pretty tough to learn. It uses the agile methodology which is very powerful and it has tons of components available to extend your application where most of them are reusable.

Here’s a summary of which frameworks I think are better for certain situations:

  • Slim framework is incredible for using rest APIs
  • Symfony and Zend are great for enterprise level platforms they are bit more difficult but also very powerful.
  • For speed and performance. We have Phalcon PHP which is based on C and C++ and manages resources very well.
  • When it comes to rapid development CakePHP is at the top with their scaffolding tools.
When it comes to ease of use and learning CodeIgniter is the one and the overall best we have Laravel which is pretty good in almost all situations

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