For my latest project, using PHP/MySQL, I wanted to use a framework to take some of the repetitive from me. I’ve looked at a number of frameworks, and here are some of my findings.

First of all, this is not a complete comparison of all PHP frameworks available. I just had a look around, and selected a few that looked promising and gave them a test drive. The frameworks I tested are:

• Symphoni
• CakePHP
• QCodo
• Prado

Symphoni

I mainly looked at this framework because it seems to be the most used. I figured so many users can’t be wrong :)
Symphoni leans heavily on Ruby on Rails philosophy. A bit too much for my liking. The thing that put me of were the yml files, used to describe database table and relations. I was looking for a tool to take the hard work away from me, I didn’t quite see that happening with Symphoni.

QCodo

QCodo is still in a premature state. The design is very elegant and event driven. Very nice support for automatic generation of data classes and scaffolding pages. I’ve build a prototype project using QCodo a few months back, and I liked it. But the premature state put me off this time. I wanted something even better.

Prado

Prado is also event driven, which I like. The screen casts on the Prado site give a good impression of the speed at which you can develop applications with it. I opted out though because Prado doesn’t (yet) have an easy way of creating CRUD screens. They do have a setup called SQLMap, but that involves having to write SQL statements for every database action; just the thing I’m trying to avoid.

CakePHP

CakePHP is nicely designed, has a fairly large community and has ample functionality. I very much liked the caching, authentication and scaffolding options. It’s not as light weight as some of the other frameworks, and it does take time to learn, but I’ve decided to ‘bake’ my project with CakePHP.