I have worked on a lot of different systems and projects in my years and most of that was spent doing PHP. However just recently I have noticed a new major point in time - a new era of PHP frameworks. Seems like everything is changing these days. I want to discuss what I think the current state is, what's wrong with it and how the new gang of frameworks is going to change it.

Juozas starts with a brief history of the "why" and "how" PHP frameworks came to be and how they've improved over time. In this new generation things like dependency injection containers and annotations are changes for the better. Three frameworks mentioned specifically as driving forces in this new movement are Zend Framework 2.0, Lithium and Symfony2.

You can arm yourself with one of the PHP-based Web development frameworks covered in this article. In the following pages, I'll look closely at the Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, and Symfony. I'll also give quick overviews of Qcodo, Lithium, Seagull, and Yii. All are open source frameworks, and all implement to one degree or another the MVC (model view controller) architecture pattern. In addition, all purport to help you build a more scalable and more easily maintainable Web application than you could otherwise create from scratch and, most importantly, do so in less time.

The introduce each of the frameworks at a pretty high level and start with their "Test Center Scorecard" showing their overall ratings of each of the four they tested. They link to a few other articles that talk more about the features of each in-depth and give an "at a glance look" as well. The list shows the minimum PHP version required, licensing, level of documentation currently provided and some of the general pros and cons.

I love books! And I buy a lot of them. When I was young, I dreamt about writing a book. And thanks to symfony, my dream became true two years ago with the publication of the "Definitive Guide to symfony" book, published by APress. This book was co-authored with Francois Zaninotto and it covers symfony 1.0. Last year, I wrote yet another book on symfony, "Practical symfony", to cover the new symfony 1.2 version. This book has been a huge success online, and was self-published on lulu.com.

The books mentioned are:

• Practical symfony 1.2 for Doctrine - second edition
• Practical symfony 1.2 for Propel - second edition
• Symfony : Mieux developper en PHP avec Symfony 1.2 et Doctrine
• Pre-release chapters of the "Symfony 1.2 Reference Guide": settings.yml Configuration File, factories.yml Configuration File and Events.

This book is absolutely jam-packed with information useful to the medium-advanced PHP coder. SPL is described over a few chapters, and a quick intro to Zend's MVC framework is provided. Of particular interest to me were the final chapters, to do with certificate-based authentication, and a chapter near the beginning describing the upcoming features of PHP6. Great book - I really enjoyed it.

The review gets into detail on some of the chapters and some of the shortfalls that Kae saw about them. Things like:

• The title says "frameworks" but only one is really discussed (Zend Framework)
• The testing/continuous development sections weren't long enough
• The "web 2.0" section was a little sparse
• The only real web service protocol talked about is SOAP.

Overall, though Kae found the book to be worthy of a place on any developer's shelf.

So today you get a double bonus. You get to check out Pro PHP, Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and more by Kevin McArthur. You also get a great tutorial on SPL!

The sample chapter looks (obviously) at the SPL, the Standard PHP Library - functions included with PHP5 releases to accomplish some pretty cool things.

I've run into an issue, or rather a friend of mine has. He asked me for advice, I gave it to him, but I'm curious how others would do this. The problem is this:

Team A, has been working on some code for a few months, Team A has a class called "SomeClass". Team B, is an "outsourced" team, who is writing a SOAP interface to Team A's code. Somehow, due to whatever reasons, Team A and Team B developers didn't talk.

Team B also created a class and called it "SomeClass". These classes are in files called "Aclass.class.php" and "Bclass.class.php" . There are some files, that include both files.. obviously, you end up with a "cannot redeclare class" fatal error.

Vidyut's suggestion was to just to change the class names. Unfortunately, this might not work if there is no communication between the two parties - they cannot come to a compromise on the naming.

He question to the community is "How do you handle an issue of single namespace, or rather no namespace ?"]]> Wed, 01 Mar 2006 07:04:27 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4850 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4850 Ian Kallen has posted some opinions on the current state of PHP application development and some ways that he'd define best practices to help it.

I've annoyed PHP enthusiasts, friends and colleagues alike, with my distaste for PHP. There's nothing intrinsically bad, buggy or poorly performing about PHP per se. It's real simple: a lot of PHP code that I've had to pick up the hood on is a mess and is susceptible to worlds of instability and bugs.

I'm confident that I or someone else could eventually derive a tool set that meets a rigorous standard for maintainable code. What concerns me are the prevalent practices and establishing best practices. I want to work with the someone else to establish them.

Among his suggestions are included things like "use clear APIs in classes" and "use frameworks to encourage separation of concerns". He also suggests a more wide use of unit testing in PHP to help rid your apps of common issues...]]> Wed, 15 Feb 2006 07:30:06 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4784 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4784 mustapha has posted his Top 10 list for his opinions on PHP frameworks.

Development of PHP scripts without a preconceived plan to manage them is asking for a headache. The goal of a framework is to make the process of writing web-based applications simpler.

An application designed around MVC is easier to manage because it is split into tiers, which allow for independent development. This promotes code reusability by building models, which are reusable throughout the application.

His list includes frameworks like Phrame, Symfony, and CakePHP ranked according to his personal tastes. He does provide some backing behind his top three choices, however - giving his reason(s) for picking them.]]> Thu, 02 Feb 2006 10:10:10 -0600