The IBM developerWorks website has posted part one of a new series their doing introducing three of the most popular PHP frameworks - the Zend Framework, Symfony and CakePHP.

A few short years ago, one of the more common criticisms about PHP was that it did not support MVC-style architectures. Times change. And these days, there are a number of choices available in the world of PHP frameworks. This series takes a look at three widely used PHP frameworks - Zend, symfony, and CakePHP - examining their similarities and differences while building and extending a sample application in each of the three frameworks.

There'll be five parts to the series - this first one looking at the scope of the series and the getting the frameworks installed and the following parts on building the application (including Ajax functionality) and how to do something else, outside the framework.