On the ZFort.com blog there's a new post that talks about the "Mexican standoff" between PHP frameworks, covering some of the background behind some of the more popular ones and some of the main differences between them.

PHP is one of the most widely known and potent programming languages used today. However, despite the popularity of PHP, there are many businesses using PHP without making use of a quality PHP framework. This approach slows production time and increases costs. A PHP framework is advantageous because it provides you with modules and codebase to help structure and accelerate the web development process.

[...] For CEOs, CTOs, product owners and those in the tech industry, choosing the right PHP framework can help cut production time and costs. However, every PHP framework is unique. [...] Given the wealth of PHP frameworks available, it is important to conduct solid research in order to find the platform that’s right for you. [We'll] take a look at three of the most popular PHP frameworks (Symfony, Laravel and Yii) and break down which is the best, and why.

The article then goes on to cover three of the more widely used frameworks:

• Symfony
• Laravel
• Yii Framework

For each the author covers some of the origins of the framework and some of the things that it's best at. Following these there's a section that briefly compares them and how approachable they are for developers new to frameworks. While they all have their strengths the author recommends Symfony as the framework with "the most long term potential" over the others.

On the Cloudways blog there's a new post from author Saquib Rizwan that compares two of the most popular Laravel-based content management systems: OctoberCMS VS AsgardCMS.

Web developers and development agencies around the world love rapid application development. To keep up with the fast pace of development and fulfill client requirements within the deadline, developers often use a CMS. Popular CMS options available today include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento. There are times when these established players are not up to the task. In such scenarios, developers often need a flexible and customizable CMS that are often created using the Laravel framework.

In this article, I will compare OctoberCMS and AsgardCMS, the top two Laravel powered CMS.

The article starts with a brief overview of each, describing some background and how their architected. It then lists some of the requirements for each, installation methods, GitHub "profile" and the basic features offered. It then gets into the comparison, sharing some of the pros and cons for each CMS. There's no "winner" in the article as it's just designed to compare.

On the KillerPHP.com site there's a new post that compares two popular languages - PHP and Python and tries to answer the question "Which one should I learn?"

One question I get often, is which programming language should you learn? I’ve been getting this question for years!

Things change in the programming world, languages come and go. But the good news is that the basics, the core concepts and techniques, are 90-95% the same in all the modern programming languages. [...] What that means, is that your programming language choice, isn’t nearly as critical as you’d think. Why? Well, once you know one programming language, it is easy as apple pie to switch to another!

He then gives some of his own thoughts about how you could decide which language you should pick including the kinds of programming (target result) and what kinds of jobs you can get with each.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post that compares three deployment tools to help you manage your VPS servers: RunCloud vs Forge vs ServerPilot.

When your website or web application has outgrown your shared hosting account, it is time to move it to the cloud, or into a virtual private server (VPS). [...] However, I can recall when I wanted to move my website to Amazon Web Services a few years ago, and it took me days to deploy the server and get it ready with PHP, MySQL and Apache.

Fortunately, that is not the case today as we have the help of some cool tools and third party services. I took a look at three similar services – RunCloud, ServerPilot and Laravel Forge – and compared them to see which performs best.

The post then walks through each service showing how to set up an account and talking about the pros and cons. Screenshots are included showing the UI and the steps you'll need to set up servers and providers. The post ends with a look at performance tests on the resulting VPSes including information like time of request completion, response time and successful/failed transactions. These results show a clear leader as far as performance results - Laravel Forge - but there are some reminders that performance is only part of what you should consider when selecting a service.

On the Delicious Brains blog there'a a post that compares four different products for creating local PHP development environments: XAMPP, MAMP, DesktopServer and Local. Both package provide similar functionality but with slight differences.

An easy-to-use local testing server is one of the most important tools in a WordPress developer’s utility belt. Developing in a local environment lets you make changes to dev sites quickly and easily without having to transfer files anywhere and greatly reduces the risk of making breaking changes on a live server.

While many computers are capable of hosting a WordPress site without needing to install any extra packages, there are a few advantages that a dedicated local development environment can offer.

[...] There are quite a few different applications and tools that fit this bill, but for now we’ll be comparing the 4 GUI-based tools that seem to me to be the largest players in this space: XAMPP, MAMP (Pro), DesktopServer, and Local By Flywheel.

The post then walks through each piece of software, covering the installation and getting it up and running with a WordPress application. There's also a mini-review for each with good/bad comments and an overall rating.The post ends with some comments about the author's own preferences, which they use now and which they'd choose in the future.

The CloudWays blog has posted an article sharing the results from some benchmarking they've done comparing Laravel 5 on PHP 5.6 versus PHP 7.

Laravel is rapidly becoming a popular choice for PHP projects. The framework has established its reputation after the release of version 5.x. In the same vein, PHP recently received a major update in the form of PHP 7.1.x.

It is an established fact that Laravel has a solid codebase and provides optimized performance for all lightweight and enterprise level applications. However no statistics about Laravel 5 benchmarks and its performance with PHP 5.6 and PHP 7 are widely available.

Using the Blitz testing tool and sample Laravel applications managed through CloudWays (on DigitalOcean), they benchmarked mean response times and the "hit rate" of the requested pages. Graphs are included of the results for both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7 and the post ends with a comparison of the results from the two scenarios with PHP 7 coming out on top.

On the TopTal.com blog Karin Sakhibgareev shares some of his thoughts around picking the right framework for your project. More specifically he focuses on the selection between two popular options: Symfony or Laravel.

Today, when starting a new project, one of the key decisions is to pick the right framework. It’s become hard to imagine building a complex web application from scratch nowadays without one.

Many popular languages for web development have their “default” framework, such as Ruby on Rails for Ruby, or Django for Python. However, PHP has no such single default and has multiple popular options to choose from.

[...] In this article, I am going to compare these two frameworks and show you how to implement simple, everyday features with each. This way, you can compare the code of real-life examples side by side.

He starts with a brief history of each project (Symfony and Laravel) and quick guides to getting them installed. He then configures them with a few basic options (database connection, security details, etc) and compares the setup processes against each other. The reminder of the post follows the same pattern covering:

• routing setup and configuration
• templating (Blade vs Twig)
• dependency injection
• database usage via ORMs
• event dispatching/middleware

The post ends with a sort of "real world" application of each framework, showing what it would take to create a simple REST API. He finishes with his thoughts about the "winner" of the comparison...but suggests that it's more about the right tool for the right job than one framework that does it all.

On Medium.com Taylor Otwell, lead developer and creator of the Laravel framework, has posted some results about framework code complexity based on his own research and information gathering.

Last week as I was refactoring and cleaning Laravel for the 5.4 release, Graham Campbell showed me some code complexity statistics for the framework. I decided to compare this against some other PHP frameworks to see how Laravel stacks up.

[...] I was pleased to see Laravel has the lowest average method complexity of any of the frameworks measured. In addition, Laravel does not contain any method longer than 13 lines of code. [...] The primary goal of this comparison is to compare how I personally write code vs. how other projects are writing code. All project’s measured have a large enough sample size of pure, first-party code to accurately measure that.

He then shares the cyclomatic complexity numbers for several different (and popular) frameworks in the PHP ecosystem:

• Laravel
• Symfony
• Zend Framework
• Cake
• Slim

He also compares just the Eloquent ORM and the Doctrine ORM components. For each he provides stats like: lines of code, average method complexity and percentage of methods that are non-static. The results are interesting but most are pretty much expected (like the Slim microframework being lowest on several of the statistics mostly due to its size).