Thoughts on Some PHP Frameworks
In this post I want to share my opinion on some PHP frameworks that I have ever used, they are CodeIgniter, Kohana, Zend, Doo, and Yii. I list them in the order I met them.
1. CodeIgniter
CI is the first PHP framework I have ever met. Since this was a new thing for me, I didn’t feel any like or dislike towards it. But after several use of it, the first thing that comes to my mind was “Is that it?”. Yes, I feel CI is very simple, but also too simple. That’s why it is very beginner-friendly but lacking many features.
What I like about CI is it’s clear and complete documentation. The user manual is very very helpful for anyone willing to start learning CI. What I dislike about CI is the fact that it supports PHP 4. Because of this, CI do not utilize the many benefits of Object Oriented aspect of PHP 5. This is a big disadvantage for me because not many application use PHP 4 anymore, so why don’t it just create another version which fully supports PHP 5?
In conclusion, CI is really simple but lacking OO.
2. Kohana
Beautiful. That is the word that best represents Kohana (in my opinion). Kohana was introduced by my college friend when we collaborate on a project. He said Kohana was derived from CI but with much better features and why CI didn’t follow Kohana improvements. When I take a look at Kohana myself (Kohana was at version 2 at that moment), I feel amazed, really amazed since I compared Kohana with CI. Kohana keeps the simplicity in CI design and adds much more features. Also Kohana introduces a unique filesystem called “cascading”.
But when I said “Beautiful!”, I wasn’t referring to it’s design or philosophy, but rather the source code (literally). Yes, this is the first time I see such clean source code. Every source code of Kohana core consists of many helpful comments. And while many other open source project only has one big comment at the beginning of the file, Kohana source codes contains many helpful line comment, at the average of one line comment every two lines.
Despite all that, Kohana is lacking in what CI most good at: documentation. It’s such a pity that a web framework this beautiful doesn’t have a beginner-friendly documentation.
In conclusion, Kohana is beautiful and powerful but lacks good documentation. Read the rest of this entry »
