I have started looking into PHP libraries that might help with the task of building the new World Series of ‘Tubing site. I have tried to get into CakePHP, but the number of keywords and magic spells that you need to know frustrates me to no end. This says something about where I am in my career as a programmer, but I’m not sure what.
In my prototypes, I have strung together PHPActiveRecord and Smarty (which, BTW, I have found very pleasant and not at all frustrating), but now I want to make sure I am using the best options. I’ve been out of the PHP loop for too long and I’m not sure whether to go with just an ORM and make the MVC pattern myself, or to go with an existing framework. Here is what I need:
- plenty of documentation
- extensions for things like video, maybe some for popular APIs, etc.
- active community/not likely to be abandoned any time soon
- ess complicated/structured than CakePHP
- caching
- AJAX
ORMs
If I decide to just use an ORM, these are the options I have found.
- Doctrine – works with Symfony. Very popular according to The Goog’
- Propel – also has some advocates out there. Also works with Symfony
- RedBean – looks nice. 761 posts in forum
- Outlet – “simpler than Propel and Doctrine and it works similar to Hibernate.” But Hibernate is a Java framework, and I loathe Java on the web.
Frameworks
I have consulted PHPFrameworks, but this didn’t really get me any closer to a decision. This is the long list of possibilities I have come up with. All of them pretty much meet my requirements.
- CodeIgniter [info]- very active forum
- Symfony [info]
- Zend [info] – Of course I know about all of the Zend libraries, but I didn’t know they had a framework.
- Kohana – no info on phpframeworks (worrying), but seems to have a somewhat active community. 4858 posts in the forum. Moreso than Yii, anyway.
- Yii [info] – Seems pretty Cake-like.
- Cubed
- Akelos [info]
- Seagull [info]
Didn’t make the list
- ATK Framework – Seems too business-focused
- ADODB – website too ugly
- Concrete5 – Too much of a CMS. Not flexible enough
- dORM – as an ORM, actually seems *too* simple. Not enough features.
- Repose – not enough community/activity
Too many options! Haaalp me.
3 Comments
You covered alot of them – I’ve been only playing with django recently as I’m working on the “django-federation app”:[http://gitorious.org/federated-photo-gallery/django-federation]
BUT – somehow I stumbled on “Lithium”:[ http://lithify.me/ ] while futzing around. It’s a fork of cakephp by some of the developers who didn’t like the roadmap for cakephp3. They seem to have their shit together and it looks good.
No warranty, I haven’t really trawled through it. Dreamhost supports Passenger – so why not just pick up Django or Rails? Both are mature, smart, and require 2 less keystrokes to access a member variable.
I agree with Matt. If you’ve been out of the PHP loop for a while and you’re hitting a learning curve anyway, then it might be time to hit something more elegant like Rails/Merb.
ActiveRecord is a pretty sweet ORM for getting things up and running.
Haven’t used Django myself but I head good things.
The other thing that occurred to me was using Drupal+CCK just to get the thing off the ground. That way you don’t need to interact with the DB at all, just point and click through the web interface to create whatever entities you need.
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