I thought I'd throw in a question for a change! As I'm quite sure at least some of my readers are skilled PHP developers, some of them might be able to throw in some insightful remarks when it comes to the future of PHP5 and frameworks.
I guess most developers will agree on this one: We're all getting sick and tired of writing so-called 'plumbing code'. It's a boring, tedious and flat out annoying job to write CRUD classes (Create, Read, Update, Delete) over and over again when developing web applications. Other boring things are form validation, input filtering, database abstraction layers and complex presentation layers. Then there's AJAX. Most of us like it, most of us want to do it but very few of us like to write hundreds of lines of javascript code.
The folks who came up with Ruby On Rails were right on the money when they came up with their framework. This thing eliminates most of those shitty tasks no one likes to perform.
So, no matter how nice Rails may be, suppose you want to stay inside the PHP arena. There's at least three frameworks that I know that seem to hold some promise for the future. The big question is: Which one to use? Choice can be nice but sometimes it just isn't. This is another nice thing about Rails. There's no need to choose between different frameworks. If you're going the Ruby Route you'll be traversing it on Rails. Not so for us PHP5 folks. What have we got?
- Symfony: A very interesting looking framework indeed. In addition to that it seems to be VERY well documented. It also has a full blown real world example application with a very elaborate 'How we built it' tutorial.
- WASP: Another PHP5 based framework I've heard some nice things about. There's however a lot less to read about this kit.
- CakePHP: yet another framework that looks nice. There's some nice showcase sites too.
All of these frameworks more or less share the same goals. They try to take away a lot of 'plumbing code' and other boring tasks I mentioned earlier. Which one to choose doesn't seem all that obvious though. Therefore I figured it would be nice to ask this question to my readers:
Which PHP5 framework do you prefer (or better: you're already using it) and why?
I'm interested in your thoughts!
