How To Choose The Best PHP Framework For Your Next Project?

The recent development in PHP version 7 and the need for every professional to build up his website has increased the usage of PHP 7. The recent release is more stable and makes it the best language to be used as a server-side programming language. The problem lies in how to choose the right PHP framework.

PHP is used even by the top web development companies to create and maintain their systems. Even Facebook uses PHP to maintain its systems. A recent poll shows that 82 percent of websites are being powered by the PHP Framework web services.

Before choosing the right PHP framework, make your vision clear, collect what is needed, and find out what you would be working on:

What is your main purpose behind building the website? It is important to find out your real purpose behind building this website. Will it be a directory, a social communication website, an e-commerce platform, or just a messaging frame? If it’s about e-commerce, then you would need a framework that provides you with payment gateways and plenty of extensions, and if it’s a messaging frame, it will be a platform that uses databases and multiple servers for faster connectivity and load balancing.

Which environment would you be using? Your primary goal decides which environment you would be using. A heavy framework requires extra software and PHP modular designs which you may not find with a shared hosting environment, and you would need to download it. On the other hand, lightweight frameworks require fast servers, higher data manipulation rates, and large data processing. MySQL is the best option for such frameworks and provides all additional extensions and libraries needed for the lightweight framework.

What good developer you are? It doesn’t mean that a bad developer can never build a website. It’s just about finding your weaknesses and strengths. Even a good developer has weaknesses. This helps beginners to choose a user-friendly framework. Also, the security and the cost of maintaining the website add to the point of which framework to choose.

How to Choose PHP Framework?

• After deciding your purpose, see whether the framework provides you with the functionality and the features that meet your requirements.
• What new would you learn from it?
• Is it possible to expand it and compress it to the limit you want to? And combine different modules.
• Does the PHP framework Development Company give regular updates and is regularly maintained?
• Does the PHP framework development website have an updated forum to help its users with the difficulties?
• Do the PHP framework web services provide short or long-term supports?

PHP Frameworks can be Broadly Classified into Three Types

• Glue Framework: It has no tightly held modules and thus provides great flexibility. It is designed for high-end developers giving them freedom to program in the way they want.
• Full stack Framework: It is a configuration-focused framework, and so gives lesser flexibility than the glue type. It is the best option for beginners enabling them to practice codes for the different frameworks and allowing them to add different features to additional modules.
• The mixed framework is a combination of both the full stack and glue type, giving the user options to use either of them depending upon the requirement.

Top PHP Frameworks Available in the 2017 Market

1. Laravel

It is the best PHP framework for developers. It is a very user-friendly framework that exists in today’s market as is known as “the best development framework available for users and non-developers.” Its popularity doesn’t make it perfect, but the extensions; the built-ware, documentation, modules, and easy programming make it the best development tool in existence.

Laravel’s Blade template system makes the user work easy by letting them use PHP codes. Also, it has zero overhead as the files are saved in “.blade.php.Extension” format. This enables the files to be converted into raw PHP code while processing. Laravel supports many databases such as SQLite, PostgreSQL, Microsoft BI, MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis.

Also, it has a strong community and updated forums helping and solving doubts of different users around the globe. Frameworks that have structured formats enabling its expansions through installing packages or with the usage of extensions to provide better functionalities are called the best. Laravel is the one of those. Laravel provides 9000+ packages.

It is a full stack framework and provides functionalities to develop a website and enables back-end database management to frontier programming. It supports Object Relationship Mapping.

Advantages:

• Extensive compilers for package distribution and management
• It has unit test points
• It has thousands of packages for expanding the modules and functionalities of the framework
• Good forums and community for better learning
• It is the most stable available framework available in the market

2. Symfony

Symfony comes with pre-built up code that helps developers to make changes and integrate them into a website application easily. It is designed for providing higher stability and greater performance with greater flexibility. It is an open source website development framework developed by SensioLabs.

It gets updates at regular intervals and version upgrades for a better simulation. It allows the user to choose from two versions of modular format and full stack framework. Modular is used for lower applications while the full stack is used for complex programming.

It has reusable modules and enables the developer to scale the modules to bigger or smaller ones as per need and complexity. No other PHP framework provides 30 components like it does that gives the developer scopes for research and development.

Even third party development tools can be integrated with Symfony. You might not believe it, but yes, even Laravel is built from Symfony. Symfony’s template system is called as a twig and has many advantages. A developer can clean codes and even program the framework using few, shorter and precise codes. It changes the raw PHP code to a simpler language.

Symfony supports databases such as MongoDB, NoSQL, CouchDB, graphDB, MemCacheDB, MySQL, Microsoft BI, PostgreSQL, GemFire, MemBase, Oracle, DynamoDB, and Apache Jackrabbit. Also, Symfony provides 2830 extensions.

Advantages:

• It provides long-term support even after release
• It has plenty additional features
• It is considered the most stable available framework after Laravel
• It is full stack framework
• Used for complex and rapid project development
• Comes with lots of modules
• Good community for learning website development

3. Yii

Yii is the most secured, higher and faster performing PHP framework development tool available in the market. It was developed by Qiang Xue to make website development an easy job. Its compilers are designed with dependency manager that handles PHP codes very efficiently. It is capable of handling and controlling plenty dependency modules and different add-ons.

What makes the Yii the best framework? It is its powerful cache collection ability and inbuilt support for Ajax. Core teams have designed it for high-performance capability and adaptability. It is designed in a manner that the developer gets easy available modular codes which can be cleaned and reused.

Codes can be changed as per requirement and can be made shorter and simpler. It provides an easy interface with third party applications and codes. This makes it easier to combine Yii with other frameworks. Error correction is the biggest advantage of Yii. Also, it has a unique feature of jQuery integration.

The integrator uses scaffolding technique for code generation and helps the developers to learn the framework and its programming quickly. It uses components that enable rapid component development. Like other frameworks, Yii doesn’t allow third party development template interfacing. It has its template system which can be chosen by the developer as per the requirement.

Smarty and Twig are the template system supported by Yii, which adds to the advantage of Yii PHP framework. It uses MVC framework and has 2800 extensions to offer. It supports database management systems like SQLite, Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB, Microsoft Bi, and PostgreSQL.

Advantages:

• It is used for real-time application development as it provides faster operations than the other frameworks
• On the spot error flow detection and handling features
• Expandable modules
• MVC framework
• It is the better option when comes the need for creating ‘Restful’ web development and services
• It has better template system than other frameworks
• It has inbuilt support for Ajax, no need for additional downloads
• Has good community for e-learning and for acquiring knowledge about website programming and development

Summing Up!

An excellent PHP framework is one that provides modularity, is scalable, has easy programming platform, higher efficiency, supports almost every database management system, error detection, and correction features, and has a big community for all round development and support for developers. For me, Laravel is the ultimate winner as it has all the features.

Laravel is the latest and the most stable framework used by the top web development companies. Now, choose your PHP framework wisely after going through all the details and the one that meets almost every requirement.