Review of PHP frameworks: Do You Use the Top 5?

Laravel

Laravel has gained attention in the past 3 years, new features have made common tasks easy including: routing, caching, session handling and queuing allowing for faster web development. It has multiple forms of cache storage such as File System, Database and XCache. It also supports custom templates and has a CLI based code generation. The template engine – Blade, compiles views in plain PHP code until they are modified resulting in zero overhead in your application. Laravel has included Homestead which is a Vagarent box that pre-configures you a development environment without requiring to setup a web server, install PHP and HHVM. You can even test your Laravel code using the popular PHPUnit.

Security wise, Laravel is safe from the more popular exploits; XSS, XSRF and SQL Injection. Laravel supports PHP arrays from the Internationalization (i18n) for multilingual websites.

Laravel interest by region: Google Trends

Symfony

Symfony utilizes the Doctrine 2 and Propel Object Relational Mapper (ORM). It supports HTTP, APC, XCache and eAccelerator for cache storage. Symfony uses the PHP and Twig template system and also supports the MVC architecture. The code generation is also based on the traditional CLI.

Symfony also supports SensioGeneratorBundle for creating code skeletons for CRUD controllers, bundles and form classes. Symfony supports PHPUnit for testing purposes and has PSR-3 compliant logging management. The framework also provides programmers certifications through their exams and supports CSV, XML and PHP formats for Internationalization.

Zend Framework 2

Zend is the one of the most popular and also well known frameworks. This might be because the development team behind Zend are also the core developers of PHP itself. Zend has PHPUnit as a testing library and also supports MVC architecture. Zend lost some popularity when other frameworks in the market became easier to learn. Zend is still popular among big players though, and having the certification on your Resume will play well with larger brands. BBC and Cisco WebEx are the few giants that use Zend Framework on their web projects.

CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is one of the oldest and widely used PHP frameworks. It is popular in the web developer community for large scale websites using the MVC (Model View Controller) architecture. Although, you are not enforced by CodeIgniter to use the MVC architecture in particular. It has file based, APC, MemCached and xCache based cache storage along with XML encoded remote call procedures. CodeIgniter has a very small footprint, a mere 2 MB. On the testing side, PHPUnit is also available for CodeIgniter but is still in the development phase. Codeigniter also has XSS, XSRF and SQL Injection safety. Furthermore, it has the language class available from Internationalization (i18n) for  multilingual websites.

Interest in CodeIgniter over time: Google Trends

CakePHP

CakePHP is popular, lightweight, simple and fast. It is easy to learn due to its flexible nature. It supports custom templating with Twig or Smarty. As for the cache storage, one has APC, MemCache, Redis for it. CakePHP uses the standard CLI for code generation and for QA Analysts, PHPUnit is available for testing purposes. CakePHP uses a custom ORM. It makes uses of the gettext and PHP array for internationalization purposes. The latest version of CakePHP, CakePHP 3.0 has improved session management and has standalone libraries for efficient development on the Web.

A Comparison Over the Last 6 Months

Source: Google Trends

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