For the start of a new year, it was time to clean out the list of PHP frameworks. A few have fallen by the wayside, but many new ones have been added. It seems that patterns and MVC is still all the rage, but less are professing to being Rails clones, though the inspiration of convention is still strong. There are a wide variety of framework types. From full stack (cakePHP, Symfony) to components (eZ), a bit of both (Zend) and minimalist (LightVC, TinyMVC, Pluf).

Requirements to be on the list include that the framework must be PHP-based, have a recent code release in the last 12 months, needs to be available in English and not including frameworks that can be considered content systems themselves.

As of the time of this post, there are around 50 active frameworks listed - everything from CakePHP and the Zend Framework out to eZ Components and Prado. Links for each include their project homepage and some reviews the site has done.

One of the challenges many of us have faced before and will face in future is building a menu. Now this of course is very simple assuming that we're just shooting for a static <ul> with some <li>'s containing the links. However the tricky part is to figure out what is the active menu item. I had some code doing this in the past but tried out a new flavor of it today which I call the MacGyver menu for CakePHP as it's a little dirty yet powerful and easy to maintain.

In his included code, he creates a simple navigation from an array of titles/links and, with some sorting, a regular expression and a CSS class, the selected item can be highlighted simply.

The reason behind using persistent connections is of course reducing number of connects which are rather expensive, even though they are much faster with MySQL than with most other databases.

They go on to talk about:

• issues with the number of active connections that could come up
• the use of too many connections at once
• why persistent connections are disabled in the new mysqli extension

The PHP application used for this study is a DVD store application that simulates users logging into an online catalog, browsing the catalog, and making DVD purchases.

The solution presented in this paper demonstrates how Zend Core for IBM with IBM DB2 9 performs, scales, and offers the best total cost of ownership. This is showcased by scaling-out Web servers as users to the online store increase. The single DB2 data server manages this without requiring the addition of CPU and memory using its unique connection concentrator feature, which manages and balances the workload on the data server. This solution is able to efficiently service tens of thousands of simultaneous connections to the database using this powerful feature.

They've included complete information on all of the testing and infrastructure they used to achieve this impressive feat. There's even graphs and images for those skimmers out there looking to glean what they can.

The options provided for the poll were:

• How is it licensed?
• What is the language/environment?
• How long has it been around?
• Is it actively developed?
• Who is using it?
• Is there support?

The results show an overpowering victory for the "actively developed" category, with the licensing and language requirements tying for second place. The option the least number of people cared about? Who was using it...

I've always dreaded frameworks. Ususually it takes longer to learn a framework than to actually code the project in the first place. Over the years I've checked out various frameworks and all fell short when I tried to do something that needs to be done in the real world. There's always some tradeoff that needs to be made.

Now Zend Framework will no doubt be successfull and most likely in a year from now should have a pretty good feature set but for today it looks like there is a king of the hill for PHP frameworks(for me anyway). CakePHP.

He talks about some of the major advantages that he sees for the project, including its documentation, built-in pagination support, and Active Record functionality. There was an issue with the last of them that he noticed as his code got a bit more complex - performance issues with the Active Record implementation. Outside of that, though, he only found goodness inside of this cake.

I'm pretty excited about this weeks webcast. I'll be speaking with Brian Goldfarb and Joe Stagner of Microsoft about how PHP can be used for enterprise development on the Windows platform.

I think that everyone should consider checking in and asking these guys some questions.

He also mentions that Microsoft, for a long time, only saw PHP in the context of the LAMP "package" and not as a stand-alone language. Seems their outlook has changed a bit - check out the webcast to see just how much...]]> Thu, 09 Mar 2006 07:02:23 -0600