To develop PRADO Web applications, you instantiate pre-built and application-specific component types, configure them by setting their properties, respond to their events by writing handler functions, and compose them into application tasks. Using a few examples from a demo application, this article demonstrates how to implement custom components into your PHP applications using PRADO.

Their example comes in the form of a login form that uses some of the basic form helpers that come with the framework including textarea generation, input validation, layout helpers and headers/footers.

PRADO is a component-based and event-driven Web programming framework for PHP 5. A PRADO component represents a combination of a PHP class, an HTML template and a specification file (in XML). PRADO components are combined to form larger components or form complete PRADO pages. Developing PRADO Web applications involves instantiating pre-built and application-specific component types, configuring them by setting their properties, responding to their events by writing handler functions, and composing them into application tasks.

They walk you through the download and installation of the framework and include some sample scripts to show how it all works together. There's also an example of the optional application.xml file that lets you define different settings for your app, either application-wide or down to each module.

This [word game] project was going to be slightly larger, and writing everything myself from scratch would have taken far too long. So I decided to use a PHP framework. PHP frameworks are a collection of code, meant to make your life easier and to aid you in the rapid development of dynamic websites. My choice fell on the Prado framework (see www.pradosoft.com).

He walks you through a first example script with both sides - controller to create/gather the content and the custom tag markup for it to inject the content into. He also includes a look at some of the Ajax support included with the framework. His example is the user clicking on a "Add to Cart" button to call the backend "onToCartClicked" method.

In a perfect world, I would suggest to learn them all! However, there are only 24 hours in a day, and prioritizing your PHP framework education might be a good idea. So above I added a poll that I plead to other PHP developers out there to vote on. Hopefully after a lot of participation we will see the most popular PHP framework.

His motivation is to provide a good resource to developers looking to choose a framework and wanting to find one of the best supported and most used choices. He also solicits comments on the post if you have opinions on why one framework shines above the rest.

What I miss in the feedback I got from my previous post was people acually using VCL/PHP for enterprise applications and how that is working. From what I can tell the usage of Exceptions is still limited to the 3rd party libs such as Zend Framework which are included with VCL/PHP. That's a bit interesting.

He mentions one big issue that several people pointed out with the VLC implementation - the class name prefixing (or lack there of) and the problems it could cause in the future. Prado uses naming conventions that keep its classes out of the move generally named realm. He also touches on the quality of the code behind the VLC implementation, noting that while it might work well for smaller projects, there's more of a potential for failure on enterprise-level usage.

As of now, we are moving through the era of web application frameworks. That's the landscape we are surrounded with. Plenty of frameworks have been built during these years broadly categorized under software frameworks, web application frameworks and JavaScript frameworks (or libraries), and plenty more are being developed.

He starts with these frameworks:

• CakePHP
• CodeIgniter
• Symfony
• Prado
• Django
• Ruby on Rails

He looks at the non-PHP frameworks first to see how difficult they'd be to get into. Despite reservations about the different language structure, he shows favoritism towards Ruby on Rails. He has reviewed the PHP frameworks yet, so it's not a final decision.

I've been asked on the forum about my preferences in frameworks and I wrote a few thoughts about it.

These comments include the fact that eighty percent of his code is not in frameworks, that the Zend Framework is the more flexible of the group and that the right tools, methods and language structure is the real key to making for successful software development.

He summarizes the functionality in three different methods of handling: "page/file based", "action based", and "component based". He also notes that the interesting fact is that the "page/file based" method seems to be so dominant in the PHP world, only emphasizing the fact that PHP is more of a "get it done" language than anything.

My favorite PHP framework just got a new release, adding several new components and fixing 30-ish bugs. The bundled JavaScript libs (Prototype / script.aculo.us) have also been upgraded, so that should help lots of people struggling with the old versions.

You can download the framework from its website and, if you're new to it, check out the tutorial to get you started. Prado is a free PHP5-based rapid application development framework that doesn't go with the usual MVC format of most frameworks. It opts instead for "logic be stored in classes and presentation in templates".

The December issue of International PHP Magazine includes my latest article "Seamless AJAX with PRADO - An introduction to ActiveControls". In this article I discuss some AJAX design patterns and show you how to make use of them in AJAX enabled components that ships with the PRADO framework.

More information about this issue (and subscribing to the International PHP Magazine) can be found on this page of their site and details on the PRADO framework are over on the project's website.