

Ask HN: What PHP frame work is best? - thatusertwo

I've been asked to pick a framework for the development of a pretty big project (3 Month or so). PHP is the chosen language, but what framework should we go with? My professor seems to be suggestion CakePHP or codeIgniter.
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nantes
I've been using CakePHP on an existing project (Cake was already in use) and
it does not completely suck. It provides the normal, useful MVC abstractions,
an interesting way of integrating non-Cake libraries, and decent updates (on
the 1.2.10 release as of last week).

Having said that, Cake does not enforce separation of business and display
logic like the Django templating language does. Unfortunately, my predecessor
took great advantage of this, defeating much of the purpose of MVC.

All in all, I like Django better, but CakePHP gets the job done.

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dazzla
Drupal is a great framework and much more. IMHO using something like Drupal is
a higher order of development and we should be building with the bigger pieces
that such a tool provides rather than having religious wars over languages.
Sure language X or Y may be more elegant or faster at building feature A but
feature A has been built over and over again. So why not build on top of
something that already provides commodity feature A and concentrate on
building the unique features?

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citizenkeys
PHP frameworks are lame. Seriously. PHP is simple enough that you don't need a
framework. None of the frameworks are very well maintained. All the frameworks
are more trouble than they're worth. Later on, you will end up spending more
development time getting away from the framework than you did implementing it.

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johnny22
i think you'll have to back up your statement more than that. Symfony2 and
other frameworks that require php 5.3 seem to be quite well maintained.

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citizenkeys
The only thing a framework does is give you new functions to call existing PHP
functions. That slows down everything down and results in shoddy junk code. In
over 10 years of php development, I have yet to see a single real-world case
where using a framework was better than just directly writing lean php code.

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tgriesser
Real world situation, you decide to move your database from mysql to
postgresql because you're unhappy with something that oracle is doing and you
want to move to a database that is completely free and open-source.

Using a framework, you change the $config['driver'] from "mysql" to "postgres"
and you're good to go.

Without using a framework, you need to change every query your application
makes. Good luck with that. If you don't have to do that because you
standardized it yourself with a bunch of functions then you actually are using
a framework, just one you made yourself rather than an open source one.

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jmhobbs
I've been using Kohana for about a year now, and I'm really liking it.

<http://kohanaframework.org/>

Supports 5.2+ only, nice ORM, and has a cool autoloader system that I really
like. Make sure you have an opcode cache in production though :-)

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hansy
Depends on the project

clickable: <http://www.phpframeworks.com/>

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johnny22
My opinion is that one should set a requirement on php 5.3 as a baseline. if
it doesn't match that skip it.

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veyron
Can you give some more info about the project?

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thatusertwo
Its sort of a job site.

