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 am one of the privileged few to have worked with Zend Framework since before the original public pre-alpha release. [...] What [Mike Naberenzy] showed me at the time captured my imagination: the company with the best known name in the PHP industry was building an application framework, and the code I was seeing was simple, straight-forward PHP. It was the first time I'd seen a framework I was actually interested in using -- even if it was in its early, early infancy. I knew at that moment that I wanted to be involved in the project.

He mentions some of the things that "shook up" the development world when those first versions of the Zend Framework came out - like the PHP5 requirement and the CLA you had to sign to contribute.

Other BOSSie award winners include jQuery, Apache Hadoop, Git and Go.

As we've seen time and again, in an increasing number of enterprise software categories, open source has become a promising alternative to commercial software. But there's no free ride. Support from developers is often problematic, and you need to find products with a large enough following so that programmers have an incentive to build add-on modules. [...] Yet if you take support out of the equation, Drupal emerges as the better solution for many enterprise Web projects.

They point out some of the good (the power and flexibility of the CMS) versus some of the bad (the need for developers/admins with specific knowledge of the system) with a heavier lean towards the good. Other "goodies" they include are the robust installer, pre-integrated modules, like the Content Construction Kit and Mollom, and the ticket system built into the application for help with CMS-related issues (from Acquia).