In a recent post on his blog David Otton shares some of his thoughts on a major struggle between web developers (and not just PHP ones) - frameworks versus libraries.

We all know that loose coupling is good and tight coupling is bad, so why, over the past couple of years, has the web industry gone nuts for tightly-coupled frameworks?

He talks about the evolution of the framework, how Ruby on Rails really popularized it and some of his experience with a few of the PHP ones (CakePHP, Zend Framework, CodeIgniter and Symfony). Of those he experienced, he felt that that strongest player of the group was the Zend Framework. It allowed for the framework feel and functionality but provided enough separation to be able to drop in libraries and configure custom settings easily.