15 PHP Frameworks

Stuck on what PHP Framework to use for an upcoming project?

Look no further!

Frameworks are the streamlined flow of PHP codes meshed up and baked for you to just use and implement. PHP frameworks are the result of codes written by many talented developers around the world. In other words, PHP frameworks help to promote rapid application development (RAD), which saves you time, helps build more stable applications, and reduces the amount of repetitive coding for developers.


Recess Framework




Recess is a RESTful PHP framework that provides a fun and enjoyable development experience for beginner and seasoned developers alike. If you want a full featured RESTful web application without having to master the command line or learn complicated deployment recipes, Recess is for you. Recess is fast, light-weight, and has a very small footprint—ideal for LAMP development and drag-and-drop deployment to shared hosts. Recess is a modern framework that uses a loosely-coupled Model-View-Controller architecture designed and optimized specifically for PHP 5.

Cake PHP



CakePHP might just be the most popular PHP framework around right now. Also uses the MVC framework. CakePHP is a little heavier than CodeIgniter and Kohana but has it has its own advantages: It has plenty of documentation which makes it fun and easy to understand, an interesting collection of helper classes developed by the community and having a well studied and structured approach on how to bake your cake.

Vork



Vork is intuitive & easy to use and does not have the overhead or performance-penalty typical in PHP frameworks. Since Vork removes the undesirable qualities of utilizing a framework we felt that it is a framework that cuts away all the negative framework qualities leaving only the benefits and so we split the word “framework” straight through the letter “W” leaving just “Vork”.

Simple PHP Framework



The Simple PHP Framework is a pragmatic approach to building websites with PHP 5. It’s geared towards web design shops and freelance programmers looking for a common foundation to quickly bring web projects to life.

Zend Framework



Extending the art & spirit of PHP, Zend Framework is based on simplicity, object-oriented best practices, corporate friendly licensing, and a rigorously tested agile codebase. Zend Framework is focused on building more secure, reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications & web services, and consuming widely available APIs from leading vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr, as well as API providers and cataloguers like StrikeIron and ProgrammableWeb.

Fat Free



Condensed in a single 55KB file, the framework’s simple domain-specific language gives you access to Fat-Free’s all-purpose template engine, flexible cache, automatic spam protection, integrated unit testing tools, and code profiler. It’s so small and fast – it even has a bandwidth throttle for controlling Web server traffic. It’s also the only framework that shields you from bandwidth theft and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks.

Akelos



The Akelos PHP Framework is a web application development platform based on the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern similar to Ruby on Rails. It aims at helping programmers build multilingual database-backed web applications and write less code, which allows for the creation of uniform, simple to understand scripts.

Flourish



Flourish is a PHP unframework — a general-purpose, object-oriented library. It has a modular architecture, meaning it isn’t strictly MVC. It focuses on being secure, well documented and easy to use, while solving problems intrinsic to web development.

Konstrukt



Konstrukt is a very light weight PHP framework with the following key aspects:

• Controllers are resources
• URI-to-controller-mapping gives your application a logical structure
• Routing based on logic rather than rules
• Nested controllers supports composite view rendering

CodeIgniter




CodeIgniter is a powerful, high-performance, open-source PHP framework that helps you author PHP applications rapidly. CodeIgniter is known for having a light footprint, there by reducing your server’s work.

LightVC



LightVC is comparable to, although unlike, CakePHP, Code Igniter, symfony, Solar, and Zend Framework to name a few. It’s major difference is that it does not try to be a full “Web framework” and instead tries to solve the need for an MVC that isn’t coupled to other tools.

Adroit



Adroit is a lightweight PHP 5 MVC framework that is geared towards helping you develop faster. The main motivation behind Adroit is to keep it simple, but provide useful features that developers want. Whether you’re just beginning web-application development, or a seasoned veteran, Adroit can help make that experience better.

Tekuna






Tekuna is a compact framework for web-based applications. It provides a stable basis and a generic infrastructure for your projects. Tekuna has a very small footprint and will not pollute your codebase with unnecessary stuff.

UltraLite




Vision Media created the UltraLite framework with a need for a light weight, high performance, ajax ready, feature rich framework. Common frameworks such as CakePHP and Codeigniter are certainly great frameworks and we encourage you to consider them both as well as others. However all of this said, UltraLite will prove to be lighter, faster, along with an extremely simplified learning curve.

Zephyr 



Zephyr is an ajax based framework for php5 developers. you can easily develop business applications using this robust framework. this is extremely easy to learn and very simple to implement. you can deliver a full fledged ajax application with strong business layer in backend within some minutes. installation and deployment of packages that you develop for zephyr is hassle free. moreover you will get all the features of most popular templating engine “smarty” and powerfull data access layer “adoDB”. lets go through the documentation process to discover how easy is to develop an ajax application using zephyr framework.