Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been able to work on projects using Zend Framework, CakePHP, and CodeIgniter. These are just a few of my own thoughts on the different frameworks.
CakePHP
Not a huge fan. My understanding is that CakePHP spawned from a desire to replicate the Ruby on Rails movement in PHP. My experience though is that it is slow and poorly documented. They try to get you to do things their way and I’m just not a big fan of that. I can understand trying to standardize for the sake of rapid development, but then you are stuck with development methods which work for small scale projects and not large complicated ones.
Zend Framework
This is the framework I’ve had the most experience. It’s got great documentation and a very active community. It does have the biggest learning curve though. While it’s true that ZF was more of a library in the past, they’ve made great strides to provide an application framework and a pretty decent one at that. It’s flexible and extensible. You can quickly whip up a small project and the system is adaptable enough that you can also build out large scalable projects.
CodeIgniter
CI is a great choice for those who don’t want to deal with the learning curve of ZF. It’s fast, well documented and has a great development community. It’s supported by a great company who has done a great job developing and promoting the framework. After working with CakePHP it felt refreshing to work with CI. Things were cleaner, faster, and just made more sense to me.
Summary
You can probably tell that I’m not a CakePHP fan. If I hadn’t picked up ZF for a few projects earlier in the year I probably would use CodeIgniter for everything. It’s still a bit of a toss up.
