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OPEN SOURCE PHP WEB FRAMEWORKS

CakePHP was started in 2005 by the effort of Polish web developer Michał Tatarynowicz.

Heavily inspired by Ruby on Rails, CakePHP is an entirely community-driven open source project

with lead developer Larry Masters (aka PhpNut). The next major release of CakePHP has also

been announced, but its release date is still unknown.

The most important goals of CakePHP are its friendliness, development speed, and ease of use. And

it really excels in that. Works out of the box (or oven), with no conﬁ guration. It has perfect docu-

mentation with working examples for most of its features. And it has really a lot of features to use.

That allows the most rapid development with a smaller amount of code.

One of the most controversial features of CakePHP is its compatibility with PHP4. While once

it allowed deployment on old cheap hosts that did not support PHP5, now it is more a drawback

hindering CakePHP’s development. Fortunately, version 2.0 will use PHP 5.3+. There are also

reports of CakePHP’s really bad performance, but they were mainly due to disabled caching by

default.

Zend Framework

Started: 2005

License: new BSD

PHP versions: 5.2.4 since ZF 1.7.0

Its logo is shown in Figure 1-5. Website:

http://

framework.zend.com

Zend Framework is sponsored by the U.S.-Israeli

company, Zend Technologies Ltd., which was cofounded by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, the

core developers of PHP. Strategic partners of Zend Technologies Ltd. include Adobe, IBM, Google,

and Microsoft. The company offers various commercial products; however, Zend Framework is an

open source project released under the “corporate friendly” new BSD license.

ZF is meant to be simple, component-based, and loosely coupled. This means that it is a library

of components, which you can use as you wish, and usage of MVC architecture is optional. This

lowers the learning curve and increases its ﬂ exibility. The documentation is great, and the source

code is of very high quality, both because it’s fully object oriented and thoroughly unit-tested. Zend

announced an upcoming 2.0 version as well, but its release date is still unknown.

Other Frameworks

There are hundreds of PHP frameworks. This is not an exaggeration if you count all of them,

including ancient and already abandoned projects, as well as brilliant younger startups and

some useless short-lived junk. The web app market is a big one, but the amount of PHP tools is

FIGURE 15: Zend Framework logo

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