Framework Suggestion

Discussion for various published PHP frameworks, including Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, Kohana, CakePHP, Yii, Symfony, and others.

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dimxasnewfrozen
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Framework Suggestion

Post by dimxasnewfrozen »

I'm tasked with re-developing a mid-size company's website. I'm looking at using a development framework to build an CMS around it. I'm not sure exactly which framework works for this situation. I'm leaning towards Codeignitor at the moment until I get convinced otherwise. Here's some info I'm dealing with right now.

- 50,000+ unique visitors per month
- Ability to have hundreds of links/pages/ids based on CMS entries
- work with Oracle 10g/11g
- work with a Red Hat Cluster
- multiple levels of security for users - currently 500,000 users
- Easy/Quick modification to files
- Ability to easily upgrade framework versions
- Good framework community/support - I don't want to use something that was developed yesterday so to speak.

I consider myself moderately skilled in PHP and Oracle so I don't think configuration will be a hassle (which some frameworks are troubled with). I appreciate your suggestions.
Peec
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Re: Framework Suggestion

Post by Peec »

At that specter I would not use Codeigniter, but rather use Zend Framework.
dimxasnewfrozen
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Re: Framework Suggestion

Post by dimxasnewfrozen »

Hmm. You think? From what I've gathered, it seems like it has a bit of a learning curve. I will do some more research on it. Another thing I forgot to mention is that there will be about 10 other developers working on the system developing applications. Some of them are novice level PHP programmers.
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John Cartwright
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Re: Framework Suggestion

Post by John Cartwright »

dimxasnewfrozen wrote:Hmm. You think? From what I've gathered, it seems like it has a bit of a learning curve. I will do some more research on it. Another thing I forgot to mention is that there will be about 10 other developers working on the system developing applications. Some of them are novice level PHP programmers.
Your right about the learning curve. It has taken me quite awhile to become really proficient with it, develop an overlay to the framework, and conform to it's best practices. However, I would not dream of using another framework now.

My answer is use what fits best with your personal preferences. They are both good frameworks, however, Zend I would consider more mature, has a bigger community following, and is more professional (plus it sounds good to employers saying you use a *ZEND* framework :D)
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Zyxist
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Re: Framework Suggestion

Post by Zyxist »

Zend Framework is not very fast. Many components are extremely overcomplicated, so if you want performance, you would have to do something with them. However, it has definitely the best community support from all the frameworks.
Blackshawk
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Re: Framework Suggestion

Post by Blackshawk »

Zend Framework is not very fast. Many components are extremely overcomplicated, so if you want performance, you would have to do something with them.
As a whole yes, but there's no reason to use the entire framework for this project. From what he said there's already a sizable code base - he just needs a framework around it that he can add CMS functionality to. There's no reason he couldn't use a few Zend components (such as the MVC classes, forms, and maybe the database if he even needs it).

A good thing about ZF is that its highly modular - its components are designed to be independent of each other unless there is an obvious dependency.
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Eran
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Re: Framework Suggestion

Post by Eran »

Zend Framework is not very fast
Not very fast at what? benchmarks? I've been using it on real sites for over 2 years now (maybe 3?). It's never the bottleneck or even a factor (hint: it's usually the database). The nice thing about ZF is that it has a steeper learning curve for a reason - it's very customizable. If you had performance issues with it you can easily (relative to other frameworks) optimize the problem parts, but I'm willing to wager that won't be a problem.

50,000 uniques per month is not high volume traffic by the way, so performance shouldn't even be a consideration.
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greyhoundcode
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Re: Framework Suggestion

Post by greyhoundcode »

Blackshawk wrote:There's no reason he couldn't use a few Zend components ... A good thing about ZF is that its highly modular - its components are designed to be independent of each other unless there is an obvious dependency.
True. My framework of choice is Kohana, but I often make use of various ZF components, many of which are actually very easy to use (particularly as ZF is very well documented).
josh
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Re: Framework Suggestion

Post by josh »

Zend is very fast, however uses a lot of PHP files, so it may perform poorly on the wrong hardware. You can either put more money into your filesystem instead of the CPU/ram (always a good idea), and/or concat all the PHP files into 1 big include file, so there are not a lot of PHP files any more, both will take care of all the performance issues Zend has. The typical bootstrap time is 800ms and usually around 700ms is the time it takes for your file system to include all the PHP files. If you have a fast file system you can definitely get it down to under 100ms.
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Zyxist
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Re: Framework Suggestion

Post by Zyxist »

Right, but there are also other good frameworks which manage to achieve such times without any special tricks, and if we apply them there, too, the performance can be even bigger. The server argument is not really convincing, because for every website we can build a powerful server enought that would handle it eventually. You have no problems with performance, but I had to replace ZF with something else in one of the internal systems I'm developing because of performance reasons (the system had to measure execution times, and it was very important to have them correct).

However, for now I'd choose ZF for such a task, too, but in the near future I'd consider Symfony 2.
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