Take a look at the top 5 PHP Frameworks For Developers

Here’s a look at the best 5 PHP frameworks for developers

It is very difficult to create complex applications or websites in today’s areas. However, with the help of PHP, which is known as the most popular server-side scripting language in the world, we can easily and quickly develop a website. It has come a long way from the first inline code snippets appeared in static HTML files.

Nowadays, developers need to make complex websites and web apps, and above a certain complexity level. This is where PHP frameworks help, as it always helps to build a complex software application, and you can spend more time for specific tasks and functionality.

Why Use A PHP Framework?

The most common reason as to why so many developers like to use PHP frameworks and how these frameworks can level up your development process are given below:

• Make speed development possible
• Provide well-organized, reusable and maintainable code
• Let you grow over time as web apps running on frameworks are scalable
• Spare you from the worries about low-level security of a site
• Follow the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern that ensures the separation of presentation and logic
• Promote modern web development practices such as object-oriented programming tools
• Great Community support
• Performance Tools
• Utilities and libraries
• Form validation
• Database abstraction
• Email, Calendar and pagination

In this article, we provide you the top 5 PHP frameworks that can best facilitate and streamline the process of backend web development.

1. PhalconPHP

Phalcon is a high-performance PHP web framework based on the MVC pattern. Originally released in 2012, it is an open-source framework licensed under the terms of the BSD License.

Unlike most PHP frameworks, Phalcon is implemented as a web server extension written in C, aiming to boost execution speed, reduce resource usage, and handle more HTTP requests per second than comparable frameworks written primarily in PHP. Phalcon is also packed with many cool features such as a universal auto-loader, asset management, security, translation, caching, and many others. As it’s a well-documented and easy-to-use framework, it’s definitely worth a try.

2. Laravel

Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework intended for the development of web applications following the MVC architectural pattern. According to Sitepoint’s recent online survey, it is the most popular framework among developers. Laravel has a huge ecosystem with an instant hosting and deployment platform, and its official website offers many screencast tutorials called Laracasts.

Some of the features of Laravel are a modular packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager, different ways for accessing relational databases, utilities that aid in application deployment and maintenance, and its orientation toward syntactic sugar.

Laravel has its own light-weight templating engine called “Blade”, elegant syntax that simplifies tasks you most often need to do, such as authentication, sessions, queuing, caching and RESTful routing. Laravel also includes a local development environment called Homestead that is a packaged Vagrant box.

3. Symfony

Symfony is a PHP web application framework for MVC applications. Symfony is free software and released under the MIT license. Symfony aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications and to replace repetitive coding tasks.

Symfony is aimed at building robust applications in an enterprise context, and aims to give developers full control over the configuration: from the directory structure to the foreign libraries, almost everything can be customized. To match enterprise development guidelines, Symfony is bundled with additional tools to help developers test, debug and document projects.

The components of the Symfony 2 framework are used by many impressive projects such as the Drupal content management system, or the phpBB forum software, but Laravel – the framework listed above – also depends on it. Symfony Components are reusable PHP libraries that you can complete different tasks with, such as form creation, object configuration, routing, authentication, templating, and many more. You can install any of the Components with the Composer PHP dependency manager.

4. Yii 2

Yii is a modern PHP framework best for creating web developing and APIs. Yii is a free, open-source Web application development framework so easy to use. It’s written in PHP5 that promotes clean, DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) design and encourages rapid development. It helps the developer to ensure an extremely efficient, extensible, and maintainable end product.

Yii 2 is combined with jQuery, and it comes with a set of AJAX-enabled features, and it implements an easy-to-use skinning and theming mechanism, so it can be a great choice for someone who comes from a frontend background. It has also a powerful class code generator called Gii that helps in object-oriented programming and rapid prototyping, and provides a web-based interface that allows you to interactively generate the code you require.

5. CakePHP

CakePHP is already a decade old (the first version was released in 2005), but it’s still among the most popular PHP frameworks, as it has always managed to keep up with time. CakePHP is an open-source web framework and follows the MVC approach. It is written in PHP, and modelled after the concepts of Ruby on Rails.

CakePHP uses well-known software engineering concepts and software design patterns, such as convention over configuration, MVC, active record, association data mapping, and front controller.

The latest version, CakePHP 3.0 improved session management, enhanced modularity by decoupling many of the components, and increased the ability of making more standalone libraries.

CakePHP has a really extraordinary showcase, as it powers the websites of big brands such as BMW, Hyundai, and Express. It is an excellent tool for creating web apps that require high-level of security, as it has many built-in security features such as input validation, CSRF (cross-site request forgery) protection, SQL injection prevention, XSS (cross-site scripting) prevention, and many others.