If you haven't taken a look at the Solar Framework in the past now is the time to do so as the three biggest complaints about Solar are on the road to be resolved.

Some of the things that might have made you skip over the framework in the past are being worked on right now:

• Solar has been in perpetual alpha/beta forever..
• Documentation, all the cool Frameworks have cool docs.
• Examples, sometimes the easiest way to learn is to study a working application

For more information about the Solar framework, head over to SolarPHP.com and grab the latest copy.

Symfony is an open-source PHP web framework that provides architecture, components and tools for developers to build and maintain complex web applications faster. The Symfony framework uses the MVC architecture to make the web applications a lot easier and faster to modify.

They walk through a brief look at the MVC pattern before getting into how Symfony can automatically create a base project (using the command line "symfony" tool), how to configure your Apache server and how to get a database up and working with some sample data. The code for their sample site is available for download.

Over the course of your web development experience, what PHP framework(s) have you worked with? What strengths and weaknesses have you observed in those frameworks? Considering these, what framework would you recommend if beginning a new application?

Fans and developers from most of the popular PHP framework have contributed their two cents into the discussion including links to other resources showing "versus" comparisons and even a mention or two of Ruby on Rails.

Some of the updates include:

• That Jamie Rumbelow has taken over as a Community Chieftain
• Rick Ellis is on twitter now
• A long list of bugs and updates to the CodeIgniter source

And, of course, he (sort of) answers the constant question he and his fellow developers get - when will CodeIgniter 2 be released and what will be in it?

Late last year CodeIgniter v1.7.2 was released with a lot of improvements and bug fixes. This version is now compatible with PHP5.3.0, they added is_php() to Common functions to facilitate PHP version comparisons, modified show_error() to allow sending of HTTP server response codes, and all internal uses now send proper status codes, Form helper improved and a new class which we are about to cover in this tutorial the Shopping Cart Class.

They walk you through some of the basics that the shopping cart class has to offer - adding items, removing them, updating the current item list. They show you how to create each piece of the MVC puzzle - the Product controller, a Cart controller and two basic views, one for the cart and the other for the products. They didn't create a model because they're not hooking it into a database/backend resource.

Sending email using the Solar Framework is not only extremely simple but very flexible as well. Solar splits the process of sending email into 2 logical parts, creating the message "package" and sending the "package"

He includes a code example of using the Solar_Mail package to create and send an email with a text section, a HTML component and an image attachment. There's also a few lines dedicated to the Solar_Mail_Transport component and how you can use it directly with PHP's mail function.

Most common way to access data is a database. Most common way to speed this up - Memcached. As a quite young CakePHP developer I had a bit of headache "how to cache queries effectively?". Now I know the way, so I share.

Rafal's method, as seen in this example using the caching methods included with CakePHP to serialize and store the database queries out to a cache.

I read the article, and wondered how hard it would be to replicate his narrative using the Solar Framework model system. Turns out it's pretty easy: there's a lot of work that Solar does for you.

He describes the process in a series of ten steps with most of them being done for you by the tools included with the framework (the ones that aren't just setup tasks). The "solar system" toolkit includes a command line application that helps you build out the models and relating them is as easy as changing some values in the model classes with methods like "hasOne" and "belongsTo".

Named scopes are a really powerful feature of models - they allow you to define a clean, concise syntax when performing queries within your models - and best of all, are really easy to utilize in CodeIgniter. The main principle of a named scope is that you create a method that, combined with method chaining, allows you to add details to your query (generally additional WHERE clauses).

He shows two "before and after" examples of multi-line requests condensed down by making a custom model layer with methods containing the commonly used portions of the database calls and returning the "$this" object so it can be used for chaining.

But a framework shouldn't be considered a panacea; it remains paramount for you to continue exploring and implementing best practices, which will further enhance the maintainability, reusability, and readability of your code. One such best practice involves adhering to a design decision that produces "fat models" and "skinny controllers." The term "fat" is derived from the idea of packing as much of the data-related logic into the model as possible while maintaining a streamlined, almost barren controller.

The concept applies to several web application frameworks out there, but they use the Zend Framework to talk about the wrong way - putting most of the application logic in the controllers - and what they think is a more flexible, organized way to handle the code. A bit of code is included to help illustrate their point.