Refresh Cambridge October: PHP Frameworks
Another month, another Refresh Cambridge evening, which this month was all about PHP frameworks.
I kicked off with an explanation of MVC and looked at the positive and negative aspects of the most popular frameworks, before diving into a lengthy demonstration of using CodeIgniter to build a simple ‘latest news’ page. My slides are on SlideShare if anyone’s interested, although obviously there’s no interactive demo available there!
Simon Jones of Studio 24 followed with a closer look at the Zend Framework, which looks both a lot more complicated and more feature-ful than CI. I don’t think I’ll be switching, but it would be interesting to see how easy it was to drop in elements of Zend to a CI app—hopefully it would just work, which would be cool.
Simon’s slides can be downloaded here.
Filed under: Refresh-Cambridge, PHP.
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Comments
- simon r jones
- 214 days ago
Thanks Matthew. Just to summarise some points from my talk, Zend Framework is a really powerful PHP 5 framework though it can be rather complex for first time users.
The central idea is flexibility, so you can pretty easily use what you want or extend features to fit your own way of working. For this reason it can fit better with more experienced programmers.
It has great I18N support and encourages decent validation, input filtering, and escaping of content when displaying on webpages. There’s a Lucene search engine implementation too which a lot of people like (and is an obvious thing to try out by itself).
At present it’s lacking any powerful form or ORM (Object Relational Mapping, aka ActiveRecord from Rails). But the ZF team are working on forms so give it a few months and there should be some great developments on that front.
Si
- #2
- Daniel Errante
- 214 days ago
I like the small footprint of CodeIgniter. It may not have as many features as Zend, but you can build apps in hours instead of weeks without learning how the entire framework functions. The other thing about CI is it’s heavily documented and the video turorials are enticing.
- #3
Dammit. I read the title in my feed and thought “cool, I might go to this, I want to learn about CodeIgniter”... but it’s about a past event. Dammit.