PHP frameworks: not there yet

Over the last week I’ve been designing a mini-PHP application. No big deal, just a back end admin system with a simple display on the front end with some blog like feedback mechanisms.

I’ve had a look at the great work the Ruby on Rails people have done with Ruby and wondered whether PHP has anything similar.

Learning Ruby is too big an investment for the simple application I want to write.

PHP does indeed have a number of Rails like frameworks. Unfortunately, none are as mature as Rails. Pity. PHP 5 is a very capable object oriented language and needs a decent framework to make it competitive.

I’ve had a look at the Zend Framework, Cake PHP and Prado. All three are nearly there, but not quite.

The Zend Framework would be my first choice but it falls down on the implementation of the model. I couldn’t find much documentation about how to interface to MySQL.

Dennis Pallett has created a great comparison of PHP frameworks.

UPDATE: Add symfony to your evaluation list too. Thanks to Sara for pointing it out.

UPDATE October 2022: There are quite a few excellent PHP web framework choices around now. Add laraval to your list.