FURTHER UPDATE:
Yii doesn't have REST support, going to check out (get it?) Symfony tonight.
UPDATE:
Looks like the documentation for Yii was written in latex! I am intrigued...
Wow, I haven't posted for a while.
I've been looking at PHP frameworks for work. Here's a summary of my thoughts so far – early days so not a lot of depth to this:
It's RESTful. It's also dead.
Could be ok. Seems big and bloated. It's definitely not dead and is a real contender to Zend Framework. Can't find anything about it being RESTful.
It's not dead but it should be. Horrible. If Zend weren't behind this I think people would vote with their feet and walk (or perhaps run) away.
I first looked at this years ago. I liked how light it felt. It's still in development so I will spend some time looking at it again, however it might be too light and it does rely on a PEAR library (DB_Table – not updated since 2008) which makes me want to run away screaming.
A unashamed Ruby on Rails port (not sure this is a good thing – why don't I just use Ruby on Rails?). To be released first quarter 2010.
It's minimalist. It's RESTful. There seems to have been recent development. I will definitely look more closely at this.
Based on CakePHP, and only runs on 5.3. Only at version 0.2 so it's not really ready to go. However there is definitely recent work on it, so it might be good in the future.
It's got a full stack, has recently released version 1.1.0, and claims to be good for high performance sites. Probably worth looking at but it doesn't get me particularly excited.
What a name. I added the exclamation mark in the title as it seems appropriate. I guess I better look into this one as it's still alive, but the whacky-tobaccy feel is putting me off.
Lightweight which always piques my interest, but seems to be long dead.
Hey!
Michael (twofish) just pointed me your way, and I'm an unashamed symfony zealot.
I can see (to some degree) about 'big and bloated', but I feel most of it is warranted. It's well architected (for the most) and generally quite flexible. I suppose it's a relative thing.
As for RESTful routing, it's pretty much been there since version 1.2 - which version are you running?
The sf(Doctrine|Propel)RouteCollection classes for routing.yml rules give you the CRUD operations, and you can tack .json, .xml, etc onto your routes to request a specific response format. so, as long as the app supports a specific request format, then you get more of it for free!
I'm certainly happy to field anything more specific you might have, though :) Feel free to email me if you've got any queries!
Cheers,
Josh
Hi Josh
Thanks for the comment - I just couldn't find any mention of REST in the documentation. I'll definitely give it a thorough working over soon :)
Donal
Interesting, I hadn't heard of most of these frameworks. I did a project in Kohana at the end of 2008 and my feeling then was that it was promising but immature. They haven't had a release in 8 months, but there are still several active committers. It's hard to measure deadness.
I've only had trivial experience with ZF, and hated it immediately. Can't say why though.
I've been working on an app at work which uses ZF. I wanted to add customised a message for form validation. Could not get it to work properly (can't be bothered explaining the weirdness that was going on – too weird). It seemed like a lot of work just to get it to (not) work properly. It makes HTML_Quickform look smart and sexy (which it's not, if you're wondering).
I've had anecdotal evidence that the Yii framework is worth looking at, so I will.
Thanks for putting up a review of Solar.
I have one correction for you: It is true that Solar uses some concepts first explored in other places, such as the Savant Template system and some PEAR packages, but it does *not* "rely" on DB_Table or any other PEAR library. Solar uses its own ORM components, explained briefly in the Getting Started manual here:
http://solarphp.com/manual/model.components
Thanks again for the review!
Hi Paul
Thanks for the clarification. I'm glad Solar doesn't have a reliance on PEAR, and my comment about "running away screaming" was based on the fact that at my work our "core" relies on some very old and verp deprecated parts of PEAR which is causing real problems. This is why we're going through the process of PHP framework investigation...I better go back and look at Solar a bit more thoroughly :)
I just can get the that "wacky-tobaccy" feeling you are talking about, but the APF is alive and kickin! Right now release 1.12-RC1 is out again with lots of new features and improvements. Maybe you ment the excellent performance making you crazy. ;)
Maybe ;) I'll take another look, cheers.