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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING SYMFONY, CAKEPHP, AND ZEND FRAMEWORK
Yii
Started: 2008
License: BSD
PHP versions: 5.1.0+
Its logo is shown in Figure 1-11.
Website:
www.yiiframework.com
Yii was founded by a developer of Prado and it continues many of its conventions. Yii is very fast
(leading in most benchmarks) and extensible, modular, and strictly object oriented. It has a rich set
of features and decent documentation. It uses no special confi guration or templating language, so
you don’t have to learn anything apart from object-oriented PHP to use it. Also, unlike many other
frameworks, it follows pure MVC architecture with data being sent directly from Model to View.
Akelos
Started: 2006
License: LGPL
PHP versions: 4 or 5
Its logo is shown in Figure 1-12. Website:
http://
www.akelos.org
, http://github.com/bermi/akelos
While all PHP frameworks are more or less inspired by Ruby on Rails, Akelos aims to be its direct port.
It is focused on internationalization (provides multilingual models and views as well as Unicode sup-
port without extensions) and can run on low-cost shared hostings (that’s why it has support for PHP4).
The author of Akelos announced the completely rewritten Akelos 2. It drops support for PHP4 and
uses autoloading and lazier strategies for loading functionality. Its hallmarks will be advanced rout-
ing methods and strong REST orientation (REST is described in Chapter 12). It is to be released in
late 2010 and it looks very promising.
Seagull
Started: 2001
License: BSD
PHP versions: 4.3.11+
Its logo is shown in Figure 1-13. Website:
http://seagullproject.org
Seagull is a true veteran among PHP frameworks — it was founded in 2001. Years of development
made it solid, stable, and tested. It is no longer actively developed, so perhaps it is not the best choice
when starting a new project, but there are still numerous successful applications that were built with
it. It has contributed greatly to the development of all other PHP frameworks.
FIGURE 111: Yii logo
FIGURE 112: Akelos 2 logo
FIGURE 113: Seagull logo
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