By popular request, here is an update of my web framework benchmarks report. [...] In the interest of putting to rest any accusations of bias or favoritism, the entire project codebase is available for public review and criticism here.

Follows the same methods as before, creating "hello world" controllers in each and running the stats against them with the Apache ab tool. A baseline non-framework example is created and tests are run against different versions (including release candidates) of each framework.

I won't spoil the results - you'll just need to check out his post to see who ranked where.

In the spirit of some other framework projects, the Solar Framework for PHP 5 now offers a ready-to-use Solar system to get new users off to a quick start. It's not prepared as a tarball just yet, but it is available for checkout or export using Subversion from http://svn.solarphp.com/system/trunk.

The sample installation creates a front controller, an authentication system and a "bookmarks" application to give you an idea of how everything fits together. You can get more information on each of these parts and how they all work on the Solar manual/wiki.

In response to Wil's comment regarding the PHP framework performance comparisons I made in my previous post, I have decided to post the results I got. My decision not post them initially was due to the benchmarks not being done in complete isolation (a separate client and server machine) but the scores relative to each should still be accurate and that's what I am testing for.

He used a machine with a 1.8Ghz sempron chip (running Ubuntu) to run the tests through httperf. His method involved creating the same sort of "hello world" sort of controller to gauge the framework's performance and a baseline procedural version of the same as a guide. His full results are available as a tar file and as a zip archive.

Symfony 1.1 extends symfony 1.0 pake tasks to create a powerful and uniform command line utility for your projects, fully integrated with the symfony Command Line Interface (CLI).

This means that is has the abilities to automatically support a "help" parameter, to grab a current task list the app is using, correct handling of the input parameters, set up a good environment and make sure that the source is readable. The post shows how to create a new task for your application - their examples are a "doNothingTask" that, well, does a lot of nothing and the typical "doHelloWorldTask" that just echoes.

They show how to define the task (including a namespace for it) and how to run it, outputing the results of the execute() method ("I did nothing successfully!" in the first case and a string of passed in parameters in the second.

Like may SitePoint readers, I cut my teeth on PHP. I've become very comfortable with it over the years, warts and all. PHP continues to be a dependable choice, but PHP hasn't changed a whole lot lately. [...] Python has a lot in common with PHP: it's a dynamically typed, open source scripting language with excellent documentation and a thriving community around it.

He includes a few basic "Hello World" kinds of examples in Python just to introduce you to the language structure (indenting for code structure? that's crazy talk for us PHPers) and some of the handy features of the language like sequences and the language's automatic namespace support.

It's almost obligatory when introducing a new programming topic, that the author present the simplest possible example. Usually this means getting a programming language or framework to print "Hello World" to the screen. I'm going to be no different. So much for originality...

He shows how to set up everything, down to the Apache VirtualHost directive and hosts file to get the web server and localhost working correctly. He includes the code for the boostrap file and how to create your first controller (along with its view, of course).

We regularly see framework benchmarks pop up somewhere on the net, comparing symfony to other frameworks, either in PHP or in other languages. The conclusion of some of them is "symfony takes more time than other frameworks to display a 'hello, world', which makes it unsuitable for real-world web applications".

If some benchmarks show that symfony is slower, jumping to the conclusion that symfony is not optimized is a big mistake. [...] If symfony is well implemented (or so we think), then its speed is just the sum of the individual speeds of all the features it includes. Or, to put it differently, Symfony's speed is the consequence of a series of choices that we made to decide whether a feature should or should not make it to the core.

They suggest that the speed of symfony applications does not come as a result of the main portion of the framework, but rather as a choice of the development team as to what parts they wanted to include in the core and what not to. They also point out that, while speed does matter somewhat, especially in larger applications, it shouldn't be highest on the list.

This article by Samisa Abeysinghe explains the SOAP extension that can be useful in providing and consuming Web services using PHP. He details the classes of extension, two implementation models of Web services, and also lists a 'Hello World with SOAP Extension'.

True to the summary, they start with an introduction to what SOAP is an how the communication with it is performed (via a handy graphic). They move from there on to the different parts of the SOAP connection in PHP - SoapServer, SoapFault, SoapHeader, SoapParams, and the SoapVal classes.

They explain what WSDL is and how to can help and move quickly into their "Hello World" example - a simple SOAP server that returns, what else, "Hello world" to the calling script (providing both the client and server sides of the equation). They include the raw response so you can get an idea of what kind of message is being passed back and forth.

Thanks to the rise of the PHP frameworks the Model View Controller pattern is becoming quite popular. To get a good idea how this works and what job PHP and Apache have, I've written a short example Hello World application which implements the MVC model without the use of a framework.

He starts with a sort of general overview of the framework - advantages, disadvantages, etc - before getting into the code. He's creating a simple "Hello world" kind of application to show how it's done and includes links to the code he's created for the controller, the action, views, the router (an Apache .htaccess file), and the PHP to handle all of the requests.

After reading How fast is your framework I was rather intrigued to compare CakePHP and CodeIgniter. [...] Each framework is required to have the output "HelloWorld!" produced from a view and a controllers will obviously have to be created.

He ran the tests with the Apache benchmark tool (ab) and the simple code he provides with the results leaning towards CodeIgniter (by a good bit). Overall, it had a faster response time than CakePHP by about half.

Check out his results and grab the code and run it for yourself - see what kind of results you get and how they compare.