Subject: [CODE4LIB] PHP Frameworks: An informal survey.

From: "Cloutman, David" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:24:22 -0800

This morning I was curious to see how the battle for domination between
PHP frameworks was shaping up, and which one was most economically
sensible for a developer with limited time to learn. I thought I'd share
my results with the list, as this may be of interest to some of you.

To gauge the demand for knowledge of particular frameworks, I did an
informal survey of job descriptions on the SF Bay Area Craigslist's job
posting. (I did not look act gigs--computers.) I entered the query "php
framework" and got 38 results. Of these, I threw out results that were
looking for someone to work primarily in another language (such as C#,
Java, Python, etc.) or doing something not particularly PHP oriented,
such as client-side development. I also threw out duplicates (there were
several) and positions where the word framework was used to refer to
something else, such as the LAMP technology stack, or an aspect of the
application to be built. I eliminated 18 positions, leaving me with 20
descriptions.

For my purposes, I defined a framework as a piece of prebuilt software
that facilitates the development of Web applications using the MVC
design pattern. Smarty (a template engine), Doctrine (a standalone ORM
utility), and Drupal were described as frameworks twice, once, and once,
respectively. Utilities for other languages such as Spring, Hibernate,
and Django also generated hits, but were not counted. If the job was
clearly a PHP job and mentioned knowledge of a framework or MVC design
patterns as desirable, I counted it as "Unnamed". If more than one
framework was mentioned, I tallied each one named. In those cases, no
job description surveyed named which framework the company used or
favored.

The results were pretty lopsided:

Unnamed: 8
Zend: 11
CakePHP: 4
Symfony: 4
Code Igniter: 2

Overwhelmingly, if only one framework was specifically named, it was
Zend. 

I also did a tally of JavaScript libraries named in qualifying
positions. The results are:

JQuery: 4
Prototype / Scriptaculous: 3
Yahoo! UI: 1
ExtJS: 1
Dojo: 1

Given my small sample size, I don't think these results are quite as
conclusive.

- David

Email Disclaimer: http://www.co.marin.ca.us/nav/misc/EmailDisclaimer.cfm

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From: Keith Jenkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:53:19 -0500

> The results were pretty lopsided:

Interestingly, these numbers match up pretty well with what Google
Trends shows for 2008:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=zend,symfony,cakephp,code+igniter&date=ytd

Keith

---

From: Chris Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:53:35 -0500

I also notice that doing a search on amazon.com gives me the following 
counts on books devoted to the frameworks you found.  I did an advanced 
search for "php" as a keyword and the framework name in the title.  Zend 
results for other Zend products (PHP cert training and Zend Studio) were 
filtered out.

CodeIgniter 3 (1 of those a brief on a special subject)
Symfony 1
CakePHP 2 (removing one in German)
Zend Framework 3 (1 of those available for pre-order)

There is another alternative for PHP developers interested in using an 
MVC framework.  If I were in that position, I'd check out "Rails for PHP 
Developers" in the Pragmatic Programmers series.

Chris

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From: Yitzchak Schaffer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:49:11 -0500

> my results with the list, as this may be of interest to some of you.

I found this post and comments to be of value:

http://www.plentyofcode.com/2008/04/symfony-vs-zend-framework-vs-cakephp-vs.html

FWIW I have been working with symfony (to the exclusion of other 
framewords) for... about a year now, I think?  I'm very pleased, 
particularly with the amount of new functionality that's come with each 
of the major new releases (1.1 and 1.2)

Cheers,

-- 
Yitzchak Schaffer
Systems Librarian
Touro College Libraries
33 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10010
Tel (212) 463-0400 x5230
Fax (212) 627-3197
[email-masked]