Phil Sturgeon has stirred the pot once more with a new post to his site suggesting that the "framework" is dead, but the framework still lives on (the difference being one is a structured whole, the other is made up of packages).

There have been a few posts over the last few months saying that the age of the framework is dead, and that Composer is the true savior, and other similar messages. This is half-true, but lots of people have been using the word "framework" differently over the years and I wanted to really work out a good definition of what a "framework" was in relation to PHP development, and in relation to these discussions.

His suggestions, sparked by a conversation on Twitter, suggest that frameworks should only provide the architecture of the application, a "set of lines to color inside". He goes back in time and looks at PHP frameworks past (like CodeIgniter and Kohana) and compares them to some of the popular ones of today like Zend Framework 2, FuelPHP, Laravel and Aura. He also talks about the good and bad of traditional frameworks, how they can be harmful to beginners in PHP and how much more difficult it's getting to be to say "That framework is popular" because of the changing definitions.