My last post about deciding between CodeIgniter and CakePHP stirred up quite a bit of discussion on why we only compared the two frameworks, and didn’t include other frameworks that were lighter, faster, utilised PHP 5.3, and other factors.
The main reason was that they were the two frameworks that we were most familiar with, which would help us to launch the project faster. Where I went wrong was mentioning that I had chosen CakePHP as I wanted to learn something new, as the biggest suggestion was that if I wanted to learn something new and grow myself as a developer, then I should learn something more cutting edge and that I hadn’t worked with before.
Fair call.
So, we’re now going to look into other frameworks, and revise our decision on which framework we are going to go with for this project, and probably the next as well.
The frameworks
There’s plenty to pick from out there, but the ones we are going to narrow in on are:
- CodeIgniter – covered in the previous post
- CakePHP – covered in the previous post
- FuelPHP
- Kohana
- dooPHP
- Symfony / Symfony2
- Ruby on Rails – a stretch, but we’ll have a peek
Initial thoughts
From the quick look over that we’ve had into the above frameworks, the one that is currently sticking out as the favourite is FuelPHP. I’d looked into this quite a few months ago and had a bit of a dabble with it, but at the time it was still early days and the documentation was pretty lacking so it was hard to play about with it without getting right stuck into the guts of it which I didn’t have the time for at that time.
How fast they’ve moved. FuelPHP has only just over a week ago, released v1.0. The IRC channel isn’t far behind the likes of CodeIgniter in terms of active users at any one time, and the documentation is a hell of a lot more detailed than the previous time I looked.
You only have to look at the commit history, and have a quick read through their blog to see that they are very active in progressing the framework, and nothing has been done ‘just because’. Each decision has a thought process behind it, which only encourages developers to trust that the framework is going to be a solid base, and more importantly going to teach a few lessons just by poking about the code.
So what are we going to go with?
You’ll have to wait and see, we haven’t 100% made our decision, but it’s looking like it’s going to be FuelPHP.
As soon as a decision has been made, I’ll post a bit more on why we chose what we chose.
I was going to suggest the exact same thing but didn’t want to be too harsh! Glad you’ve open up your scope.
I’ve heard really good things about Yii incase you’re interested in adding another one to the list ( http://www.yiiframework.com/ ) but failing that you already have a great list of frameworks to compare. Also, the ZendFramework has some pretty neat features too, however I’m guessing it’s going to be way to slow to stack up to any of the others. From what I’ve heard of FuelPHP, it’s impressive!
If you get time (or care for) performance benchmarks that would be really neat to see.
Goodluck, and I look forward to the comparison!
Cheers Drew,
Had forgotten about Zend, and Yii for that matter, will have a look into those as well.
Not sure we’ll go as far as to benchmark them all, I’m sure it’d be some awesome material and attract a butload of hits in future… we’ll see
This is the big issue.
There are so many frameworks to choose from, each with their strengths and weaknesses. I have been using cake for a while now but seem to get the feeling that it is super heavy, even with advanced caching with cake and the with the web server.
I think the fuel path is interesting.
Honestly, im absolutely sure that we should not go down the ruby / rails path. The learning curve is too high and would have a huge impact on development time. We know php so lets stick with it.
I also like the fact that fuel does not support php 4.
Nigel from Mooch’d is also doing some benchmarks with fuel / nginx and is pretty happy with the results. I will get him to do a post on some of the findings.
Cheers
I tried Codeigniter, Kohana and Fuel.
Codeigniter is the quickest to learn given the size of the community and the details documentation but due to backward compatibility with php 4 it has some limitations. Some might not be bothered by that.
Kohana would be the next choice, if u would want php5 based framework. It is a solid framework but my biggest issue is the confusion about version 2 and version 3 so much is different and the documentation was not clear about what works for what….I ended up learning by trying.
then i stumbled upon fuelphp which is based on php 5.3 this is of course a plus except that many web hosts don’t offer it yet. Still, one could easily find a decent and inexpensive webhost that provides 5.3. The framework itself is impressive, it is very fast and allows for much easier/cleaner code specially compared to codeigniter. One of the nice things is that you don’t have to load a class before you call it. Fuel takes care of that for u… …there is much more of course which i don’t have to get into but one thing i will say is that the team behind fuelphp is brilliant, quick to react and quick to fix the rare issues that might rise up, and that on its own makes it worth it. Fuel documentation is better than Kohana’s but not better than codeigniter but the way thing have been going, this will not longer be an issue in the near future.
To sum it up, Go fuelphp and never back
Thanks for your input, makes us more confident in the choice we are (most probably) going to make.
As Phil said on Twitter, the PHP5.3 issue is more and more becoming a non-issue as hosts were recommended to upgrade some time ago.
A couple of tiny things that could make a huge difference:
With the docs is that it could do with a bit of a makeover, people have long said the CI docs are awesome and the design would play a part in that without doubt.
The other is that it also needs a decent search put in place rather than having to know exactly where you need to look. Every reference site should have a search, it just makes sense.
Cheers for the feedback @twtnman. Been hearing and reading a lot of good things about fuel.
The good thing is that out host is running nginx with php 5.3 so won’t be a problem at all.
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Just wanted to mention Laravel. It has beautiful, expressive syntax, and documentation as good as CodeIgniter’s. Take a peek at it if you get a chance!
http://laravel.com
Hey Taylor,
Taking a look at that now. Never heard of laravel before.
Cheers
Cool. Let me know what you think!
For those of you who wanted to read more about alternative frameworks, I posted a long section about Symfony2 on this blog, you can read about it at: http://pixelfactory.com.au/development/symfony-2-php-development-framework/ (might not be obvious from my comment above that it is regarding Symfony2)
I love the topic of frameworks, especially great to see lots of frameworks being discussed!