Introduction
PHP frameworks are the latest hot topic in the PHP community, and new frameworks are being released daily. With over 40 frameworks available it’s difficult to decide which framework works best for your project, especially as each framework offers different functionality.
In this article we will look at a few popular frameworks, and compare them to each other.
Zend Framework
The Zend Framework is still pretty new, so there’s still a few things to come (like a user authentication module), but it does already have quite a lot. Although it doesn’t have a lot of checks in the chart, the Zend Framework does include other modules, to handle PDF files, RSS feeds, Web Services (Amazon, Flickr, Yahoo), and more. The Zend Framework also includes several different database objects, making it extremely simple to query your database, without having to write any SQL yourself.
At the moment the Zend Framework doesn’t come with a full-blown ORM, but the framework developers are still debating whether to add an ORM layer or not. This might be something we see in the future, and you can always write your own ORM implementation, and have it added to the framework, as it accepts user contributions.
The Zend Framework is looking quite promising, and is definitely working to fix the common PHP problems. The stable version will probably have a lot more checks in the comparison chart!
