Part III – Four PHP MVC Frameworks
As we said before on our small and unofficial review of the best known and most used PHP MVC Frameworks CakePHP is only on third place. Is a great framework and the number of those who use it confirm this. With a bit more difficult learning curve than CodeIngniter or Symfony but not like Zend Framework, CakePHP gives you a great list of options on how to build your project. As the other two mentioned in the previous articles and as the one that will be under our magnifying glass in the last article, CakePHP has support for internationalisation, databases migration, form validation, templates and all basic things that are needed in a project but if you don’t have them you have to spend a lot of time to build them and time means money. These are only a few things that came in our mind but there is a full list of features for all of them and CakePHP is not an exception. The problem with CakePHP is the footprint, speed and maybe, as we saw in our small test, the learning curve or the time until you feel comfortable with the framework. Around this framework there is a great community and you can find quite a lot of help out there but the help will give you only a small ray of light and you need low-level understanding, you need to understand the logic and the approach behind everything if you want to use it in your project and here is where CakePHP has a problem in our opinion.
We are pretty sure that there are a lot of pros and cons and we’ll highly appreciate if you could let us know some of them but we come back again to the same conclusion from the previous articles, it’s up to you entirely and all depends on what do you like and/or need for you project. In the next article we will say our opinion about Zend Framework and some other final details. We’d tried not to be technical along these three parts and hopefully some of you, that are not at this point so technical, will use this as a starting point because this is why we have written these articles about the most used PHP MVC Frameworks.
more soon …

















Why not just ONE good overview and conclusion.
I as everybody else am looking for answers not for something to read.
I can’t tell you which one to use it, I can’t tell you which one is the best of all but what I can is to tell you from my experience what pros and cons I saw. In other words I can share my experience. In a few words and as a preamble to the last from the four parts I can tell you that I will give the gold medal in the Lightweight category to CodeIgniter for is simplicity, small footprint, speed and much more and in the Heavyweight category to Zend Framework which is the most robust and powerfull from all but because is so big is not necessarily good for small projects. Silver goes to Symfony (Lightweight) and CakePHP (Heavyweight). Everybody else gets Bronze because we respect the idea, the effort and everything else that’s needed to build a nice working Framework.
If you need to build a specific project you can ask for a specific opinion and in that case you’ll get a closer answer.
Regards,
Marius
There’s a lot of negativity toward CakePHP especially with regard to version 1.1 and the “footprint” and even still people consider it “bloated.” The thing to really remember is that it gives you a lot up front that you’d be coding in or “bloating in” to other frameworks anyway. So by the time you’re done… What’s the difference? Except that you did more work and had perhaps more say in the matter.
CakePHP does things really well and while I’m not going to put down other frameworks (well, maybe Symfony) and consider CodeIgniter very very good…I’m just going to say that if you have scaling problems with CakePHP, you aren’t using it properly. With all the automagicness comes a great responsibility to not be sloppy. You have to be very disciplined to use that power with care. You have to take advantage of the caching mechanisms within the framework.
It’s EXTREMELY easy to code something in CakePHP that won’t hold up to traffic…and you probably coded that app/site VERY quickly. But IF you take your time and are careful, you can not only build the app/site quickly, but you can leave yourself in a position to be able to scale quite easily.
There is no limit for traffic on any of these frameworks. They are all open. It depends on how you code and how you setup your servers. I don’t want to hear the “bloat” thing because you shouldn’t mix in poor coding practices with objective comparisons. I’m staying hopeful in finding some good comparison articles…
Tom,
What I am trying here is to share a bit of my experience and because of that I know that I can be subjective. Why? Well, I’ve developed projects with different specs (large and small) but not necessarily covering the whole board. However I am in the field for more than a decade now and I my primary programming language is PHP. From that baggage I took my words but more important from my tests in using these for frameworks. CakePHP It wasn’t the one for me but this doesn’t mean that is bad and also I didn’t disqualified CakePHP just because it wasn’t the one for me. Has a lot of features but, and this is very important, in comparison with the other 3 this were my results. Each one of them can be improved (there is a lot of space for improvement and they can’t say no) but at this point in time this what they are offering.
As final thought, I will say that Cake it’s up there and is a good framework but not the best in my opinion.
Regards,
Marius
P.S.: I’ll wait for you to come with more comments like this. More opinions can only be constructive