5 Best PHP Frameworks for Developers
PHP is one of the most popular server-side scripting languages. The language has evolved a lot and got a large number of developers. With the recent version of PHP, the language has become advanced and offer a good programming experience.
These days, developers need to build complex and apps and manage it. It takes lots of coding if you build it from scratch. To make everything easier, there are a number of frameworks. You can use any of the available frameworks to get the structural code and manage it in the better way. PHP has a number of frameworks offering the good experience to manage the code and build applications.
Why Use A PHP Framework
If you are not using any PHP framework and still do coding manually from scratch, you might be thinking why should you use a PHP framework. If you are confused, you must know what you can do with PHP frameworks. I am sure the reasons will convince you to start learning a PHP framework and then use it for your next website.
1. Speed up the development process
2. Provide well-organized, reusable and easy to maintain code.
3. Help in scaling the app over the time
4. MVC pattern
5. Provides low-level security of a site
6. Built-in components and classes to save your time
Best PHP Frameworks for Developers
Now here is the list of 5 best PHP frameworks. There are so many small and big PHP frameworks. It is possible that one you already know is not on the list.
1. Laravel
Laravel was released in 2011 and in just 6 years, this has become most popular framework among developers (As per Sitepoint’s online survey). This framework comes with huge ecosystems. The company behind this framework has also issued many screencast tutorials called Laracasts. So you can easily learn this framework.
This PHP Framework comes with an instant hosting and deployment platform and offers many features to boost the development process. It has its own lightweight templating engine called “Blade”. You can easily code complex applications with its available syntax.
2. Symfony
Symfony is another impressive PHP framework with the wide developer community. It offers reusable PHP libraries that can be used to perform complex coding tasks including form creation, routing, authentication and many others.
You can install any of these components with composer and start using it. Symfony PHP Framework uses the existing PHP open-source projects as part of the framework. Ir uses PHPUnit, Twig, Swift Mailer and more. It makes it very easy to develop web apps.
3. CodeIgniter
CodeIgniter is an old PHP framework initially released back in 2006. It has straightforward installation process and requires less configuration. So, it saves lots of time in development.
Application developed with CodeIgniter can work on shared or dedicated hosting depending on your usage. It is not strictly based on the MVC development pattern, but uses of Controller classes is a must. Model and views are optional.
The size of the installer is just 2 MB and you can easily install it. It also offers several third-party plugins to extend the functionalities.
4. Yii 2
Yii 2 is another fast and popular PHP framework. I personally use it to develop my different projects. This framework is purely object-oriented and extensive uses lazy loading technique to make your application fast.
It wants to develop the code based on “Don’t Repeat Yourself” coding concept, so it offers pretty clean and logical coding experience. Yii2 comes with easy to customize theming mechanism. I like its powerful class code generator called Gii that is a web-based interface to generate the crud.
5. CakePHP
CakePHP is another old PHP framework but still used by lots of developers. The company behind this framework has managed to keep this framework up with time. The latest framework of CakePHP comes with enhanced session management, improved modularity and ability to create standalone libraries.
CakePHP has really good PHP framework used by thousands of popular websites. It comes with many built-in security features to offer high-level of security. It has security features including input validation, SQL injection prevention, XSS (cross-site scripting) prevention, CSRF (cross-site request forgery) protection and many more.
Final words
There are few other good frameworks including Zend, PHPixie, Slim, FuelPHP, PHPixie and more. But I recommend the one listed above. As I already mentioned, I personally use Yii 2. If you are new to frameworks, I will recommend you to learn Laravel. It is new but good.
Deepanker Verma is the founder of Techlomedia. He is a tech blogger, developer and gadget freak.
Leave a comment
Comment policy: We love comments and appreciate the time that readers spend to share ideas and give feedback. However, all comments are manually moderated and those deemed to be spam or solely promotional will be deleted.