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PHP Framework: How to choose one?

Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2014 9:19 pm
by vitinho444
Hey guys!! Almost on my first day as a 2nd year college student, I'm about to start some big projects.

One of them consists on making a website and mobile apps for the service and to do so I'll be using PHP/MySQL/CSS/HTML/JS/Ajax/jQuery/Bootstrap, you know the basic stuff.
But I think this can be a good chance, of stepping up on my game. So far every single php work I've done, was from scratch.

<?php
if(superComplicatedFunction() > 249.194141139844 / 39)
{
superComplicatedClass->SuperComplicatedMethod();
}
?>

Something like that :)
So, stepping up the game, I think I should do the PHP backend of the website in a framework. To do this I need to actually pick one from the hundreds out there.
My Question is which one should I pick? Should I first think on what I need, or the most used ones offer the same stuff? What should I focus on?
Anyone can help me out ;)?

Re: PHP Framework: How to choose one?

Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2014 9:21 pm
by Jackolantern
Try FuelPHP, Laravel (probably OSS's favorite PHP framework), and Symfony (the enterprise's favorite PHP framework).

Re: PHP Framework: How to choose one?

Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2014 9:50 pm
by Verahta
I haven't tried it yet, but Laravel seems to be popular.

Re: PHP Framework: How to choose one?

Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2014 10:14 pm
by vitinho444
Hum Laravel has some good tutorials indeed, since it's popular I might choose it. But what is the things I need to check to choose one or other? Or they all do the same just differently?

Re: PHP Framework: How to choose one?

Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2014 10:15 pm
by Sim
vitinho444 wrote:Hey guys!! Almost on my first day as a 2nd year college student, I'm about to start some big projects.

One of them consists on making a website and mobile apps for the service and to do so I'll be using PHP/MySQL/CSS/HTML/JS/Ajax/jQuery/Bootstrap, you know the basic stuff.
Sometimes a framework is overkill depending on what you are making. Just a thought.

Re: PHP Framework: How to choose one?

Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2014 1:08 am
by Verahta
I know Laravel is built upon Sympony but I don't know why or when to use one or the other.

Re: PHP Framework: How to choose one?

Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2014 2:24 am
by Jackolantern
Verahta wrote:I know Laravel is built upon Sympony but I don't know why or when to use one or the other.
Laravel is much, much easier to use than Symfony. Symfony is a powerful framework, but has a huge learning curve. And actually Laravel is not truly built on Symfony. Its core (to my knowledge) was built from scratch, and they used some Symfony modules for additional features ported from Symfony. But it is mostly not based on Symfony.

Symfony's days of being the enterprise darling are probably numbered. For the most part, framework/library popularity in the enterprise generally follows several years behind OSS (open source software) trends. The same thing happened with jQuery, where Ext_JS was the major JS library in enterprise development for quite a while while jQuery was preferred by the OSS community and smaller web developers, but eventually its popularity caught on and jQuery became ubiquitous at all levels.

Laravel appears to be getting the closest to PHP community consensus that any framework has gotten to date.

Re: PHP Framework: How to choose one?

Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2014 6:05 am
by Verahta

Re: PHP Framework: How to choose one?

Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2014 10:14 am
by vitinho444
Sim wrote:
vitinho444 wrote:Hey guys!! Almost on my first day as a 2nd year college student, I'm about to start some big projects.

One of them consists on making a website and mobile apps for the service and to do so I'll be using PHP/MySQL/CSS/HTML/JS/Ajax/jQuery/Bootstrap, you know the basic stuff.
Sometimes a framework is overkill depending on what you are making. Just a thought.
Actually I thought of that, I know I can definitely build it from scratch but since it will be rather a big project I thought of stepping up :)
Laravel seems about right to start with I'm guessing. Since the Open Source community is focusing on it more, and in the end of the day it's called a framework, I think it could be my bridge from scratch to framework-land. Then when I get used to it I need to move to something more company-used like Zend or CodeIgniter perhaps. :roll:

Thanks a lot guys ;)

Re: PHP Framework: How to choose one?

Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2014 11:20 am
by Jackolantern
CodeIgniter has recently lost a lot of popularity. It was never huge with companies, but used to be loved by individual developers. But those days are gone. Their reluctance to update the minimum version of PHP supported has lost them a lot of followers.